Rui Carmo(rant mode on)
You know the feeling, right? You spend months trying to get across an obvious point (and a better technical solution) and people just don't get it, because the "added value" crap (or, more precisely, what they believe to be value) gets in the way of things actually working properly.
At the risk of mortally wounding my Disclaimer, I'll stop here and just note that sometimes you can pick all three from "better, faster and cheaper" - the only thing stopping you is not caring to listen to the whys and hows.
If you're a non-technical and non-English-speaking dweeb, the ancient joke is "better, faster, cheaper - pick any two".
I feel a new organizational rant coming on... Ah well. On with the news:
- Top Then Things Techies Wanted To Know about the new iPod. Yes, Virginia, it can play 480-pixel-wide videos. Hmmm...
- Jon Stewart on avian flu (video link, via BoingBoing).
- Following this Fortune piece (found after reading the other piece on BitTorrent) , I started updating my iPhone node again. I guess it will never be finished...
- NetworkManager was updated.
- Microsoft Research's Virtual Wi-Fi. Interesting, but still has some rough edges and is ultimately useless since it does not support any form of security (which requires non-multiplexable hardware paths on some chipsets - hence the difficulty in implementing those features).
- Via Gruber, NSLog's experience with Backup. Uh-oh - and me just having switched to it for my own backups... Ah well. The way I'm using it does not rely on any form of OS backup - I just need my home directory straightened out (but I never could get it to backup other users', and that's troublesome enough).
- Flying Toasters. Ah, those were the days... After Dark was absolutely fabulous, and I sorely miss it (my favorite these days is the XScreenSaver bouncing cow, and I hope JWZ will start doing native Mac ports some day).