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I delete my thousand music files once a month when I reinstall Windows because the damn OS is so unstable. Over the past year I've deleted 12000 music files, the same ones twelve times.

Better than apple - they just delete your hard drive for you!

Maybe they won't be taking the battery route in favour of this?

This was covered LONG time ago. Here, for example. Old, old news. 03:00 AM Oct. 16, 2000 PT - the date.

Feb 1997
Wired: The Doomslayer

Aug 2nd 2001
Economist: The truth about the environment

Heres an excerpt from a Wired articleon this very subject which was debated here on /. recently:

Behler first informed Bev Harris, owner of the BlackBox Voting site, of the situation. Harris has spent a year investigating problems with electronic voting systems, and is the author of a forthcoming book on the technology. She said the practice of patching systems after they've been certified opens the possibility for anyone -- from Diebold employees to local election officials -- to install malicious code on a machine that could alter election results and then delete itself to avoid detection.

According to Harris, this scenario is particularly worrisome in light of what happened in the Georgia gubernatorial race, which ended in a major upset that defied all polls and put a Republican in the governor's seat for the first time in more than 130 years.

Republican candidate Sonny Perdue managed to unseat Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes with only 51 percent of the vote. It was the first time an incumbent governor had not won his second term since Georgia law allowed back-to-back terms in 1978.

Pundits have attributed the upset to dissatisfaction with the incumbent for altering a Confederate symbol on the state flag and to effective stumping by President George W. Bush on behalf of Perdue.

Harris acknowledged no proof exists that anyone rigged the election systems, but she said, "We'll never know exactly what happened in Georgia because there's no paper trail to verify the votes."

Does anyone know the difference in the polling vs. the results?

But when you actually try to adapt anything he does, one quickly find out that most of his examples of visualizing repetitive data are predicating on using high-resoltuion output -- like paper.

True enough. Tufte discusses this a bit more in his book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint . (It's summarized online in "PowerPoint is Evil".)

One of his points? Modern computer screens suck. The human eye is capable of distinguishing fairly high resolution data. He does have a bit of a fuzzy spot when thinking about modern computer displays. Fortunately there is still lots of need to make high quality displays of information on paper. And as he points out in PowerPoint, if the screen sucks, put it on a handout so people can appreciate the real thing.

Just like, uh, get a few sentances, put bullets next to them and *BAM*, you have a presentation for everybody. Just add some swirlin graphics and some sound, and the information really stands out. To boot, since you can spend less than a minute per slide, make like a 100 of them, and then, here's the kicker, make your audience print the whole damn thing! That way they don't have to take notes or think even.

An excellent summary. I recently read Tufte's book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (His online article, "PowerPoint is Evil" summarizes the book quite well). It's a good book and forced me to rethink how I do presentations. As Tufte says, PowerPoint is a fine slideshow program, but lining up your thoughts into slide after slide of bullet points leads to uninspired, hard to understand talks.

While discussing it with a coworker, he pointed out something Tufte only briefly touches on. Sure, the rampant abuse of PowerPoint makes life less pleasant for the audience. But that's not why PowerPoint caught on. PowerPoint became popular because it makes life easy for the presenter. When it's an hour before you're to present a talk it's not the time to start assembling a handout of reference information. No, you need something fast, something acceptable. Slide after slide of bullet points might be crap, but it's crap that is accepted as the standard. Doing it the right way takes more time.

I somehow doubt that a man who wrote the article "PowerPoint Is Evil," (itself a summary of his book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint ) would be popular with "PowerPoint Jockies."

While Tufte is definately interested in usability, he's no Nielsen. Nielsen focuses on the usability of computer interfaces. Tufte isn't terribly interested in computer interfaces (although he does discuss them), he is more generally interested in making high quality displays of information. Take a look at the majority of charts and graphs with a critical eye and you'll see deception, errors, and generally a waste of space. Tufte wants to show that a chart or a graph can be a powerful visualization tool, but we squander it. We create charts that can be understood by a first grade student, but fail to enlighten anyone.

Seriously, why don't we get/license the well working system that was put in place in Australia? Yes, its not domestically produced, but the source is there and can be verified.

Because there are serious problems with that system. The software issues are virtually a red herring and do not make their machines trustworthy. Although it seems ironic to some, the same issues exist with free software-operated and non-free software-operated voting machines. Wired revealed big problems with eVACS but buried the description of the problems midway into their article and then posted their eVACS article under a misleading headline which is probably why you reached the conclusion you did. I commented on this system in that thread and responded to one of the system's developers when the software trustworthiness question was raised.

The Australian system you refer to does not allow the voter to verify that their vote was recorded correctly and there is no permanent non-computer record of the votes to recount after the election. Even though the article quotes one of the system developers saying as much, this showstopper revelation is midway into the article and then apparently ignored for the purpose of writing the article's title. From the article:

The [eVACS] machine does not include a voter-verifiable receipt, something critics of U.S. systems want added to machines and voting machine makers have resisted.

A voter-verifiable receipt is a printout from the machine, allowing the voter to check the vote before depositing the receipt into a secure ballot box at the polling station. It can be used as a paper audit trail in case of a recount.

Green [Phillip Green, electoral commissioner for the Australian Capital territory] said the commission rejected the printout feature to keep expenses down. The system cost $125,000 to develop and implement. The printouts would have increased that cost significantly, primarily to pay for personnel to manage and secure the receipts and make sure voters didn't walk off with them.

Quinn, however, thinks all e-voting systems should offer a receipt. "There's no reason voters should trust a system that doesn't have it, and they shouldn't be asked to," he said.

"Why on earth should (voters) have to trust me -- someone with a vested interest in the project's success?" he said. "A voter-verified audit trail is the only way to 'prove' the system's integrity to the vast majority of electors, who after all, own the democracy."

As for the costs of securing and storing such receipts, Quinn said, "Did anyone ever say that democracy was meant to be cheap?"

There's no way to determine if only the software you trust is running on the machine you vote with. Your /. post is vastly overrated (+5 Insightful).

Read the Tufte article here

DeBeers and Co. are very very unhappy about these two technologies and what they're going to do to diamond prices. Both companies can create perfect diamonds and the second manufacturing process will allow (once its been scaled up) for diamonds to be used in electronics.

But here's the reason the U.S. might just end up behind the technology curve:

"Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that."

...frustrated with what he thinks of as myopia in the US computer business. "Europe and Japan have been investing in diamond semiconductor research," he says, citing the Japanese government's announcement in December that it would begin allocating $6 million a year to build a first-generation diamond chip...

Actually, it's currently being done by Apollo Diamonds and Gemesis, which was mentioned above. De Beers is fighting them as hard as they can, but even if they convince the public that manmade diamonds aren't worth anything as jewelry, they will still be able to use them for computing. However, production is not quite ready for large-scale chip manufacturing, which is why Intel and others have not yet turned to diamonds.

Just checking, because it souded like these people were hoping to do just what you mentioned as being heavily fought. And so far, they haven't been killed as far as I know.

I, for one, welcome the death of our diamond-scarcity-based overlords.

Is anybody else worried that this might turn into another Corel?

Corel died because Microsoft wanted them to.

Corel had a great plan but, ultimately, management was bought out by Billy.

People don't seem to be picking up on this. The same thing happened with Apple and OSX right after Steve Jobs dumped every last share in the company (aside from the single "symbolic" share that he did keep).

Microsoft owns each and every one of us. If they didn't, we'd have seen them split up a long time ago...

sigh...

Eastern Europe has been using a similar approach to treating bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics for almost 80 years. Wired magazine ran an article about bacteriophages in their October 2003 issue.
A bacteriophage basically a virus that attaches itself to a bacteria cell and injects it's own DNA into the cell. The DNA replicates and eventually the bacteria cell bursts releasing more phages that will attach to other bacteria cells. The phage virus is not harmful to humans and can be found in water from your local stream.
If a reovirus can be used in a similar way, then maybe cancer patients will finally have some hope.

Wired Magazine had an article that talked about how Russian "designed" viruses are making their way into western medicine to help fight off strains of anti-bacterial resistant bugs. They are very adaptive as opposed to our common medicine that just kills everything, even good bacteria.

Wired Magazine had an article that talked about how Russian "designed" viruses are making their way into western medicine to help fight off strains of anti-bacterial resistant bugs. They are very adaptive as opposed to our common medicine that just kills everything, even good bacteria.

Oh, for God's sake. The Army's switch to WebStar on Mac was reported all over the place when it happened four years ago. It's common knowledge. Here, here, and here are some links.

I notice it's running on a Dell machine. In the first season all the bad guys used 'em.

Hmm... my Boss also has a Dell! Arhh!!

a sleek design and makes exploring new music a pleasure.

I personally thought it looked horrible and was very unfunctional. The lists aren't in any particular order when you browse by genre. The interface is pretty much a nightmare. It looks like it was put together by a bunch of monkeys on typewriters. I'm glad that Microsoft is so worried about the consumer's having options but for some reason it just seems like Microsoft really doesn't care. I know that is hard to believe, but I don't think there are any plans for Napster to be on MacOSX ever. Strange huh?

What about ...Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting ... seems more important to me. Isn't this news that matters.

I doubt it. Check out

ACLU policy statement #47:

The Union agrees with the Supreme Court's longstanding interpretation of the Second Amendment that the individual's right to keep and bear arms applies only to the preservation or efficiency of a 'well-regulated militia'. Except for lawful police and military purposes, the possession of weapons by individuals is not constitutionally protected.

The ACLU is too busy defending the right to promote child molesting.

While

NAMBLA may extol conduct which is currently illegal, its materials fall far short of speech that may be prohibited. If that rule were to be changed to allow a suit like this one, it would introduce a regime of conformity to majority rule that would threaten the very right to dissent."

In self-serving fashion, the ACLU notes that the father of the murdered boy -- who is suing NAMBLA -- praises the ACLU for defending NAMBLA

While intent on pressing their suit against NAMBLA, the Curley family has acknowledged ACLU's concerns. In a Boston Globe article which appeared shortly after the ACLU entered the case, Jeffrey Curley's father, Bob Curley, is quoted as saying that he harbors no ill feelings toward the ACLU for defending the case. "I really do have respect for them (ACLU)", said Curley. "They are very consistent in whom they defend. It takes a lot of nerve to defend the groups they have over the years. They have a lot of courage."

Wired puts a different spin on it:

Attorney Lawrence Frisoli, who represents the Curleys, said he is glad the ACLU is defending NAMBLA, because he has had trouble locating the group's members.

Harvey Silverglate, an ACLU board member, said Wednesday that the group's attorneys will try to block any attempt by the Curleys to get NAMBLA's membership lists, or other materials identifying members.

The ACLU interprets Roe v. Wade as meaning that minors must be allowed to get an abortion, without having to even notify their parents (much less get their permission), and that taxpayers must subsidize abortions.

But "the people" in the Second Amendment means "the government," because a 30 year old woman is apparently too stupid to weight the risks vs. benefits of owning and/or carrying a firearm for self-protection, and can be denied the right to make that choice.

If the ACLU supported the Second Amendment in the same fashion that they do abortion, then they woudl be demanding taxpayer subsidies for poor children to buy guns, without having to notify their parents, so they can shoot the child molestors who prey on them.

Constitutional scholars who have bothered to write about the issue in various law review journals do not agree with the ACLU's position. You can read the law review articles for yourself at the Second Amendment Law Library. Much better than stuff put out by any pro- or anti-gun special interest group.

In justifying the ACLU's position on gun control, ACLU President Nadine Strossen said that

Putting all that aside, I don't want to dwell on constitutional analysis, because our view has never been that civil liberties are necessaril

From the article:
"Barry Mersky, a dentist in Maryland, bought Terfenol in 1995 in hope of creating a "tooth phone," a small device placed on a tooth that allows people to communicate in high-noise environments. Mersky's six-person company, ESComms, based in Bethesda, Md., now receives funding from the Army and Navy, whose interest was piqued after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks showed that firefighters had trouble hearing radio communications inside the World Trade Center. The dentist is hoping to have a working prototype for the military to start using by next year."

Looks like this may replace the tooth phone previously designed by researchers from MIT Media Lab Europe.

With Terfenol, you don't need an implant, but merely a plate attached to a tooth. Though there is still the question of where to put the radio receiver.

The amount of spam I receive every day has clearly been steadily growing for the last few months. Looks like the spammers are winning the war by DoSing spam fighters and hiring mercenary hackers with 450000 trojaned systems.

Person bags on me for talking about $5.7 million list price paid vs educational list price paid.

Yeah, you're right it was a little dishonest. In particular the part where I claimed it was $5.7 million when the cost was $5.2 million and included the cards/routers/cabling which (in Q&A) amounted to $1.5 million.

The G5s cost to $4.2 million not to $5.7 million. I was wrong and deceptive and I apologize.

As for the quibble about list price vs. educational list I apologize for that too: I took this information from the part where he said that they paid full list price and later assumed that it was the educational list. I'm wrong, you can spec 1100 G5's at AppleStore (non-education) for $3.27 million. If you get the 2GB of RAM from AppleStore at a rip off price, you still come in at $4.4 million--still under the $5.7 million I said in my post and (way under the $8-$10 million quoted by IBM and HP for their Opteron and Itanium2 systems).

A very good price indeed since it meant that you didn't have to "secretly explore pricing options" with Dell.

This, like the parent post, is off-topic.

It's all useless though, it relies on an operating system with proprietary components, so the failure of one company can render the whole thing useless.

Terascale relies on the Darwin Kernel which is open-source, there is no evidence that any single component relies on the proprietary parts of the Mac OS X. The head of Terascale, who wrote the code that enables it, approached the Mac "reading the kernel manual first."

Like I said before, if you read between the lines, Terascale has nothing to do with Macs. It just happened that Apple was the only company that could deliver computers powerful enough for a cheap enough price in the window that Virginia Tech needed to make the Top500. That had nothing to do with Macs, or Apple, or Mac OS X--it had everything to do with price/performance (of the 970), opportunity (Infiniband, gap in the Fall Top500), and availability (of the G5). Let's not drag this down to a OS wars or platform wars. We are witnessing a sea change. Yes, there will still be Blue Gene/L and it's ilk (there are still Crays out there), but expect the Top500 list to be overrun with commodity desktop computer CPUs in the coming years.

To me, this represents a triumph of open source. Now lets pray that the patents applications don't prevent "the rest of us" from benefiting from it.

This problem recently came up on a college and university web development list I belong to. Many of our schools sites are being blocked. Places in China will then mirror them, a problem in itself, but one that causes even more damage when their latest mirror is about 3 years old with completely out of date information.

Anyway, here were some links provided by the list about the issue (some are a little old I know):

Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China
Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, Harvard Law School, November 2002
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/
"The authors are collecting data on the methods, scope, and depth of selective barriers to Internet access through Chinese networks. Tests from May 2002 through November 2002 indicate at least four distinct and independently operable methods of Internet filtering, with a documentable leap in filtering sophistication beginning in September 2002."

China's Cyberwall Nearly Concrete
Michael Grebb, Wired, November 5, 2002
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56195,00 .html
"While the Great Wall no longer deters would-be invaders from entering China, experts... said the Chinese government continues to maintain a nearly rock-solid cyberwall. "

Software rams great firewall of China
Paul Festa, CNET News.com, April 16, 2003
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-997101.html
"The news and propaganda wing behind the U.S. government's Voice of America broadcasts has commissioned software that lets Chinese Web surfers sneak around the boundaries set by their government."

You know what is "a good thing, especially in terms of the science of technology"? Checking your facts.

Bill Gates never made the infamous "640k" statement.

People love to talk about it, but if there's one piece of credible evidence, one quote with source, one shred of corroboration to that claim, I'd like to see it.

Bill Gates, on the launch of XP:

Gates said the release of XP "marked the end of an era, the end of DOS and also the end of Windows 95." ... Gates informing the crowd that he agreed with Apple's Jobs that Windows 3.1 was a "crummy operating system," and assuring the crowd that he'd soon say that about Windows 95.

Of course, we remember they used the phrase "end of dos" for the launch of windows 95. Funny how they are now saying the same things about XP they said about 3.1, 95, 98 and ME. That's consistency!

Now, do they have consistancy in shells? They have derided their primary shell, DOS. But what of their other scripting efforts? Remember their "Unix Killer" "New Technology (NT)" and their ksh? Korn does!

I knew that Microsoft had licensed a number of tools from MKS so I came to the microphone to tell the speaker that this was not the "real" Korn Shell and that MKS was not even compatible with ksh88. I had no intention of embarrassing him and thought that he would explain the compromises that Microsoft had to make in choosing MKS Korn Shell. Instead, he insisted that I was wrong and that Microsoft had indeed chosen a "real" Korn Shell.

Ah yes, so portable it was. While NT is dead, csh and ksh trive themselves and in their free counterparts. No new training is required for bash or pdksh.

For an instant, Bill liked Java:

Java is our latest programming tool, and we've got a Java compiler with the highest benchmark feeds, great debugging. Java's -as you know, is a wonderful language, and everybody should have that in their portfolio. (1996)

He tried to make the crowd laugh at Sun in the same speach because he wanted to kill Unix with NT. Where is M$ "java" today?

C# .NET and all look to me like a combination of all the second rate junk they've thrown together in their attempt to emulate and eradicate first rate competitors. "Linux is a Cancer", they say, use our shared source instead. Yeah right.

Oh wait, I see the patterns. EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish followed by "that sucks, buy the new one." You have to be blind to miss it. If you follow the M$ way, you will be constantly sucked for money and time learning their new tweaks.

It's only going to get worse because free software is impossible for them to eat up or beat. Their efforts to stick to their previous marketing plans are wrecked by actually having to compete on merrits and price. This is making them less and less stable. The closed source model can not compete with the free software development model.

One of Google's main motivations was Don't be Evil

"Don't be evil."

Your link doesn't work.

Here is a working one.

You do know html tags work on slashdot, right? :)

Yeah, in fact, I get the feeling that this research is purely destructive. As far as I can tell, the only function of a quantum computer is to crack public-key encryption. As soon as the machines come on line, we'll have to say goodbye to https, ssh, pgp, etc. Why, then, are people so excited about advances in the field? Researchers who love quantum mechanics would do better to work on quantum encryption or on inventing more useful algorithms for quantum computers.

Sorry, the ACLU is too busy making sure the freedoms of pedophile groups isn't suppressed. I can't make shit like this up.

You forgot cellphone addiction! watch out for the danger of repetitive stress disorder, a serious malady that affects people who can't stop punching in text messages.

good thing we've got people Looking out for us.

Learn how to text message safely TODAY!

--Shadar

If you publish -- in any form -- you are beholden to laws ...

Luskin's lawsuit is grounded on defamation. I can defame you and be sued for it without publishing anything; e.g., I can just go stand in a crowded public place and tell everyone you are a child molester.

The Bill Joy article can be found here

Wired had a rather telling story about this the other month: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/bagscan.h tml?pg=1

Has anyone heard of other stories of manufacturers being deceptive so that they could get better reviews?

Is that anything like having your employees send out fake grass-roots letters, pose as random users on message boards, or secretly fund an "independent" study?

Here's something I posted on my site recently:

The November 2003 issue of Wired has an article about artificial sweeteners, tagatose in particular. I was strongly disappointed to find that the article only mentioned stevia once, in passing, and that it was not included in their chart of sweeteners. I would expect Wired, of all publications, to want to be all over something so subversive.

I'm even more disappointed to see no mention of it in this Slashdot discussion.

Here's something I posted on my site recently:

The November 2003 issue of Wired has an article about artificial sweeteners, tagatose in particular. I was strongly disappointed to find that the article only mentioned stevia once, in passing, and that it was not included in their chart of sweeteners. I would expect Wired, of all publications, to want to be all over something so subversive.

I'm even more disappointed to see no mention of it in this Slashdot discussion.

First off, I'd like to thank Wired News for linking me a couple of days back regarding this, and Why War? for providing a way for me to get at these files.

Now, then, from a January 2002 memo titled, Nearterm AVTS 4.x roadmap, discussing the classification of a major update as a bugfix:

What good are rules unless you can bend them now and again.

These are just the sort of people I want in charge of the machines that people vote on in my election. No, really. [/sarcasm]

Yeah, man, it's a complete debacle.

Yeah, like these guys.

For as DeBeers well knows, the converse is, "Any marketing process that creates scarcity steals benefits from any persons who are ignorant of abundance."

I think it is possible to agree that most armies know what they want when it comes to weapons (and normal non rocket fueled tomahawks) and still agree that there might be a lack of experiance in dealing with wintel salesmen with bold technical claims about realiability without resorting to jokes about the IQ of GI`s.

Think for example back to this wired article once mentioned on /. Be carefull though if you get upset easily by phrases like:

"What's funny about using Microsoft Chat," he adds with a sly smile, "is that everybody has to choosean icon to represent themselves. Some of these guys haven't bothered, so the program assigns them one. We'll be in the middle of a battle and a bunch of field artillery colonels will come online in the form of these big-breasted blondes. We've got a few space aliens, too."

Now you might think this is a statement from a GI about his personal laptop, it is in fact about the system used for communication between vehicels. Used for for excample warning about chemical attacks (an example given in this article) and used for getting orders from higher up`s. The person behind this statement is a "TOC intelligence guy", not a random soldier. Also noteworthy is his mention of problems with people joining chatrooms they are not supposed to, you see microsoft chat is basicly an irc client. For those unfamiliar with irc, is and ancient unencrypted chat protocol still populair among /. readership smart enough not to use servers that give away the ip`s of clients. Image doing a /whois tfranks, a great future lies ahead for irc script kidies.... So Everone who has been joking about militairy hardware with an intergrated "clippy" assistantd wasn`t that far of, microsofts "comic character==cute and therefore userfriendly" idea does extent to the battlefield...

• Obvious references to Linux/Unix/X11 still seem pretty rare to me. Some movies have featured them prominently, but unless the computer is itself part of the plot, the interface is usually made to melt into the background. Here's some examples I can think of where the *nix interface seems obvious:
  • The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful, but I'm willing to give it a pass not because of the silly computer displays, but because it has Penn Jillette in a small role, Hal (which automatically scores points for the 2001 reference). And the reason it's cool that Penn is in there is, well, because it's Penn, and he's really "in" on this silly little subculture. Witness his snarky comments on Richard Stallman, the comedic potential of the Turing Test and Markov chains ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption, and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him. So, short of putting in someone like Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, or Linus Torvalds, putting Penn Jillette in a geek role in a movie is pretty much close enough for me.
  • "Jurassic Park" had a famous scene where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI. There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
  • There are other examples of Linux in movies, but unfortunately most of the movies are awful (Antitrust, Swordfish, <troll> The Matrix </troll>, etc).
• As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for (also see here, at the bottom) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show. That said, random Mac sightings I can think of include:
  • Carrie's laptop in recent seasons of "Sex and the City" is an old black Powerbook G3 running OS9. Before that she had an older Powerbook. She was given a clamshell iBook as a gift when the G3 crashed, but returned it & fixed the Powerbook.
  • Harry Connick Jr's character had a G4 tower & cinema display on his desk in a recent "Will & Grace". The display wasn't up, so no idea what it was running.
  • In the movie "Zoolander", Apples show up all over the place. The funniest example was probably when Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are told to break into an office & steal some files off someone's iMac: after staring blankly at it for a while, they call for help and are told that the files are "inside the computer". Like wisdom dawning on the apes in 2001, they get the idea -- and start beating on the case trying to break it open and cause the files to spill out.
  • In my favorite example, it has been observed that on the show "24", all the good guys use Macs and all the bad guys use Dells. An awareness of this pattern would have uncovered a turncoat who ended up betraying people at the end of the first season.
• A lot of shows have hard to identify OSes. Probably on purpose.
  • On "CS

• Obvious references to Linux/Unix/X11 still seem pretty rare to me. Some movies have featured them prominently, but unless the computer is itself part of the plot, the interface is usually made to melt into the background. Here's some examples I can think of where the *nix interface seems obvious:
  • The movie "Hackers" is a standard one to cite here. The movie is really awful, but I'm willing to give it a pass not because of the silly computer displays, but because it has Penn Jillette in a small role, Hal (which automatically scores points for the 2001 reference). And the reason it's cool that Penn is in there is, well, because it's Penn, and he's really "in" on this silly little subculture. Witness his snarky comments on Richard Stallman, the comedic potential of the Turing Test and Markov chains ("Mark V. Shaney" -- get it?), the math behind public key encryption, and -- most of all -- is chummy with Unix co-designer Rob Pike, and has even pulled pranks on Nobel laureats with him. So, short of putting in someone like Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, or Linus Torvalds, putting Penn Jillette in a geek role in a movie is pretty much close enough for me.
  • "Jurassic Park" had a famous scene where the girl sits down at a terminal, looks things over, then exclaims "This is Unix! I know Unix!". Silly, but then it was real, sort of: the screen shots were of an experimental 3D file manager from SGI. There was probably an xterm open somewhere offcamera or behind the file manager window so that a technician could enter commands in between the GUI clips that made it into the film.
  • There are other examples of Linux in movies, but unfortunately most of the movies are awful (Antitrust, Swordfish, <troll> The Matrix </troll>, etc).
• As has been noted all over, Macs show up a lot in movies & tv shows. This probably isn't a coincidence: the machines may look nicer than the typical beige box PC, but the product placement was probably paid for (also see here, at the bottom) in most cases, just as it would be for any other identifiable consumer product in a show. That said, random Mac sightings I can think of include:
  • Carrie's laptop in recent seasons of "Sex and the City" is an old black Powerbook G3 running OS9. Before that she had an older Powerbook. She was given a clamshell iBook as a gift when the G3 crashed, but returned it & fixed the Powerbook.
  • Harry Connick Jr's character had a G4 tower & cinema display on his desk in a recent "Will & Grace". The display wasn't up, so no idea what it was running.
  • In the movie "Zoolander", Apples show up all over the place. The funniest example was probably when Ben Stiller & Owen Wilson are told to break into an office & steal some files off someone's iMac: after staring blankly at it for a while, they call for help and are told that the files are "inside the computer". Like wisdom dawning on the apes in 2001, they get the idea -- and start beating on the case trying to break it open and cause the files to spill out.
  • In my favorite example, it has been observed that on the show "24", all the good guys use Macs and all the bad guys use Dells. An awareness of this pattern would have uncovered a turncoat who ended up betraying people at the end of the first season.
• A lot of shows have hard to identify OSes. Probably on purpose.
  • On "CS

Here is a Wired News article about There.

There is even a picture of a Shopping Cart Hoverboard I modeled.

DARPA is working on this now!

Xupiter! Or what used to be Xupiter. In it's time it really wreaked havoc. Although going to their home page says they are out of business, ths link on their site shows that they may be up to something else soon

You can share some of the love for the Yomtobians here. These guys are right up there with Spamford Wallace and the Cantor/Siegel in the Internet Hall of Shame.