Rui CarmoThis Monday (yeah, I took a couple of days off and got back to the office today) there seems to be a whole slew of wierd news. For starters, 4th Dimension, the traditional Mac database (hopefully mySQL will take over some day, once the developer tools are up to scratch) got updated today.
I haven't touched the thing in years and (honestly) hate its guts, but diehard Mac developers are bound to start drooling in anticipation...
And speaking of drooling, SCO is still at it, and it looks as it'll be going after FreeBSD next. I haven't mentioned any of it so far (I had a ring-side seat on the first UNIX Wars, and these childish tantrums are beneath contempt), but it will be interesting to see if they make it. Their stock has been rising, but you gotta wonder for how long...
Oh, and a new species of whale was discovered. Like all species that make contact with Man, it was killed - way back in 1970. Predictable, no?
Boing Boing (as usual) provided the strangest bits of news - check out the USB Christmas Tree Light, the GoogleHouse or the Spam Sandals:
But the G4 Cube Aquarium topped it all:
NDIS on Linux
I've also been tracking the Atheros Wi-Fi drivers "soap opera", and spotted this nice update on the issue. The beauty of the new generation Wi-Fi standards is that they practically mandate the use of software-programmed radios (given the amount of encoding and transmission methods available, the only efficient way to design silicon for them is to give the card driver full control over the required parameters), but since having a fully Open Source driver would mean having every geeky teenager forcing the cards into illegal operation modes and playing havoc with every WLAN within range, there are no real Open Source drivers.
(Yet. Someone will, eventually, make a mess of things in the name of some stupid "Free Software" ideal, and find themselves on the other end of an FCC liability suit...)
The neat thing about the approach taken, however, is that it is based on an NDIS wrapper, providing a standartized way to supporting both Linux and Windows drivers (NDIS was one of the few things that Windows got absolutely right the first time around, and that keeps improving steadily).
3600MAh Battery for the 2210
Spotted this one over at InfoSync: there's a new 3600MAh battery out for the 2200 series - this is four times the capacity of the bundled 900MAh battery, and looks like a great addition to my 2210 - maybe I'll stop worrying about battery life (I currently recharge once a week with moderate Bluetooth usage, but would love to be able to use Wi-Fi for half a working day on seminars and meetings...)