It’s a decidedly mixed bag for the second installment of the Star Wars Saga.

I’m still holding out hope.

I agree. OSX is UNIX for the rest of us.

I know I’m going to get flamed for writing this, but Apple Computer’s Mac OS X 10.1 is what Linux-on-the-desktop people crave: a Unix-based OS with an interface even a novice can handle.

Forsberg scores the winner at the end of the second period.

Oh well…. there’s always next year.

Microsoft has come up with another novel way to make its software compulsory – an annual subscription licensing system for schools where you have to pay for all of the computers you’re using, even if you don’t want them to run the Microsoft software you’r

###Is the Judge Paying Attention?

This includes Macs, and although the Ts & Cs of the agreement don’t make it entirely clear what you’re supposed to do with the Windows upgrades you end up buying for these machines, we bet putting them on eBay isn’t a recommended option.

Hopefully, the judge in the Microsoft Antitrust trial is paying attention to how blatantly Microsoft is thumbing its nose at the entire world daring us to take action.

And if you’re kidding yourself it’s impossible to top getting people to pay for software they don’t want to run on Intel boxes, and for software they can’t run on Apple boxes, check out the Microsoft UK Campus Agreement. This has you paying for software for people who don’t even have computers.

Disgusting.

This is for those of you that think that Israel has a choice.

…Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud wrote for Egypt’s leading newspaper. His subject: the Jews.

They are accursed in heaven and on earth. They are accursed from the day the human race was created and from the day their mothers bore them. . . These accursed ones are a catastrophe for the human race. They are the virus of the generation, doomed to a life of humiliation and wretchedness. And so on through many paragraphs, climaxing with a lament to Adolf Hitler: If only you had done it, brother.

This just makes me ill.

In an interview on E! Online, George talks about Jedis and Hobbits.

I think Peter [Jackson] did a fantastic job of taking a very tough book and not only being really faithful to it but also making it cinematic.

I wish that George would pay more attention to what Peter accomplished here. The storytelling in [[The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring]] harkens back to the original “Star Wars: A New Hope”.

Let’s hope that George is back in form!!!!

My Father Died.

I can still remember his laugh.

It’s funny the things you remember about a loved one that dies.

This is a play-by-play of the speech made by Steve Jobs.

###Some Hilights

• Apple is now the largest UNIX supplier in the world.
• Interesting how hard it is to make a rack mounted box look anything other than purely utilitarian. Except for the fact that this is Apple and Steve, this show so far is little different than countless other announcements I’ve seen by Sun, IBM, Tandem… Storage flexibility… The meta-message: Apple means business.
• Apple, it now appears to me, is walking the Earth, picking up and putting to use all kinds of freely available innerstructure. They seem to be careful not to position themselves against other UNIXes. Or anything in particular, other than the high costs of Windows. I think they expect this stuff to be added, like a new crop, to existing server farms.
• Alex Grossman, director of server and storage at Apple. Steve just opened up another part of the demo rack. 14 drive bays in on e horizontal enclosure. 1.68″terrorbytes” of storage per rack set. Dual 2Gb Fibre Channel… Redundant drives, power, cooling… Independent ATA controllers. RAID processor, 128 MB of processor cache.
• Now this sucker is looking like a moon, quietly sliding in front of the Sun.
• More positioning as a UNIX company. People are calling us who never used to want to talk to us…. We’re in a lot of Fortune 500 accounts… Calls a past server exploration as a dream when Apple was in a coma.
• It’s over. Now we go to the piano bar. Talked to Steve (Jobs) on the way. Asked him what other server farm crops this would likely run alongside. Everything, he said. Linux, BSD, Sun…

###Some Thoughts

YEAH! It looks like Apple is making the right moves to stick around for a while.

Mac users may want to check the labels on their music CDs twice, as copy-protected audio discs flooding the market may lead to serious problems when they are played on some computer systems.

Unlike standard audio CDs, copy-protected audio discs embed software that seeks to block certain uses of songs, for example, preventing consumers from copying the tracks onto a hard drive. Sony, whose Epic label published Dion’s “A New Day has Come,” has included a warning telling customers that the disc is not compatible with Macs or PCs.

When are these companies going to learn that the best thing to do is to stick to the industry accepted standards.

I hope this isn’t true.

…And you’re struck with the depressing realization that we’d have all been far better off if Lucas had just left well enough alone, leaving EPISODEs I-III to our imagination…

Maybe this’ll be a good thing. I’ve already committed to going into Episode II with lowered expectations… this just lowered them more. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly suprised?