The next version of Microsoft Office looks to be quite a bit different from the last several releases, which were, on the whole, rather disappointing evolutions of the base products. Each version introduced more features without giving users any way of coping with “featuritis”—a term coined to describe Office. At one point, the menus started hiding unused features in an effort to appear smaller, but commands were still hidden in menus and the notorious nested dialog chains that hampered... [More]

The article Bush Tells West Point Graduates Terror War Is in Early Stages (Bloomberg) covers Bush’s commencement speech this year, in which he lifted everyone’s spirits with zingers like the one about how the Global War on Terror “will rival the Cold War in its length and difficulty”. It sound like his customary wit must have had them all in stitches. In a rare show of honesty, Bush acknowledged his tendency to not finish what he started by noting further that “[t]he war began on my watch, but it’s going to... [More]”

The State Department recently said that it “was concerned about the reports on a special clothing rule for Iranian minorities”. This was in reference to a recent report in the Canadian National Post about a new law proposed by the “conservative-dominated parliament” in Iran. The Post, seemingly lacking either an Arabic translator, journalistic ethics or both, made up the details of the story from whole cloth. The law would require:

“Iran’s roughly 25,000 Jews…to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the... [More]”

Google and Yahoo are tripping all over themselves to help those us of with less time on our hands create reliable, usable web applications. They take different approaches, with Yahoo providing cross-platform JavaScript code and Google providing a new way of building web front-ends.

Yahoo!

Yahoo kicked it off with the initial release of their JavaScript Libraries (earthli News), following up with a second release called AutoComplete, Windowing, Menu and More. The library looks really well-organized, has... [More]

Megatextured Pine ForestA recent article about Quake Wars: Enemy Territory mentioned that it was using the latest and greatest of rendering technologies from id Software, called Megatexturing. This Q&A with John Carmack includes more details on the development, timeline and features of this technology. He sees Megatexturing as a natural extension of texture memory management into the virtual space, as is already done for graphics memory and system memory. He’s quick to note that there is nothing groundbreaking about... [More]

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently made a very public attempt to officially open diplomatic channels with the United States after a lapse of almost 30 years. Response in the US has ranged from complete dismissal to lukewarm acknowledgement to braying laughter. Why the Iranians will be Rebuffed by William Blum (CounterPunch) provides a summary of similar efforts from the last century when leaders noticed that their sovereignty was in danger of being shoveled into the slavering maw of American empire.

These include the... [More]

Press This! No News is Good News by Ben Tripp (Counterpunch) idly ponders the complete and utter failure of the fourth estate. As proof, he offers a long—but woefully incomplete—list of scandals currently flitting from loose lip to loose lip in Washington. It could be argued that the collapse of the press is not complete, else we wouldn’t know of the scandals in the first place. That is purely wishful thinking, however, as it is far easier to report these obvious scandals but not press the issue to conclusion than it... [More]

Bush's Approval Ratings since 2001Professor Poolkatz’s Pool of Polls is a decidedly fanatical approach to making sense of polling data—specifically, the polls associated with Bush’s approval ratings. The one to the left is a straight representation with standard deviation; note the spikes at 9/11, the start of the 2003 attack on Iraq, and the 2004 elections—all followed by steady downward trends, indicating how artificial the support was. Flush Bush offers another interesting look at the same numbers. For those whose... [More]

It’s been how long? (Uggabugga) reports on a recent column, Would Bush Rather Be Fishing? by Daniel Froomkin (Washington Post) that covered a recent, short question and answer session with George Bush. Right near the beginning, he writes:

“Remember when he was asked to name his biggest mistake and what he’d learned from it—and he couldn’t name any? (He hasn’t held a prime-time press conference since.)”

The DeciderThat president Bush falls somewhat shy of the average number of press conferences for sitting presidents is pretty well-known[1]. He’s not so... [More]

In a hectic world filled with pressing issues, most people don’t have the time to examine issues and come to their own conclusions about them. Or so they’re told. To that end, mass media is only too happy to further impart the opinions that were imparted on them. With the aforementioned public already pressed for time and, most likely, attention span, what better way to get a point across than through the magic of pictures? Cartoonists are only too happy to fill this void. The samples below... [More]

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!”

The Electronic Entertainment Expo—E3 for short—is taking place right now and is producing the expected wave of hype, “in-game” movies and “screenshots”. Check out the E3 insider or the IGN site for all the latest effusive marketing/reporting. Games that want to sell these days have to look good; to that end, publishers use high-quality screenshots and ridiculously good-looking in-game movies to draw in their audience. Recent years have seen an escalation in these types of tricks, with Sony... [More]

Stephen Colbert

The Finished Product!This is the simplest possible tutorial for creating convincing OS X–style Aqua effects using only vector graphics. The Ultimate Aqua Button takes a designer step-by-step through Fireworks to create a simple oval button. Here are the advantages listed in the tutorial:

• It takes the fewest number of steps (for a technique that doesn’t leave out any design elements)
• It uses fewer objects to complete the design
• All the elements of the button remain fully editable
• The final button is made entirely... [More]

Boot Camp is the newest product recently released with the OS X 10.4.6 update. With it, Mac users can resize their hard drive, create a new partition and install Windows XP on it. It burns a CD with all the necessary drivers prior to Windows installation. Windows XP is not included.

In order for Boot Camp to do what it does, Apple adjusted its EFI-only firmware to be able to emulate an old-style BIOS so that Windows recognizes it. They also built an initial set of Windows drivers for their... [More]

At long last, ISE Eiffel has released their development environment and libraries as Open-Source software, as announced in their press release (ISE Eiffel). The project is hosted on a wiki at the ETH and includes downloads for the most recent builds and nightlies (for Linux and Windows). The ISE implementation is the only one that fully supports the ECMA-367 standard, released in June of 2005. The download includes all development tools and libraries.

This is the language that Java and C# should be chasing... [More]

Fighting Off the Strogg 'Bugs'The next installment in the Quake world is being designed not by id Software, but by Splash Damage[1]. It’s a multiplayer-only game set in massive outdoor environments using the Doom3 engine. Quake Wars: Enemy Territory Q&A (Shack News) is an interview with the lead developer. That’s right, you just read “massive outdoor environments” and “Doom3 engine” in the same sentence. How can this be?

Those familiar with game engines know that each has its strengths and weaknesses drawn from the type of game for which... [More]

Tom Brokaw Discusses Politics and Society at Hamilton covers a recent speech he gave at Hamilton College. One of the many topics he covered was the divisiveness of national politics in America:

“The ethos of national politics today is one of division between red and blue states in which the national parties seek to divide and conquer the nation by turning people’s views against each other. There is little tolerance for intermediate or unorthodox views, Brokaw said, citing examples of orthodoxy... [More]”

I Am a Liberal. There, I Said It! by George Clooney (Common Dreams) is a very short essay in which George Clooney officially outs himself, even though most would consider Three Kings, Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana to be eloquent enough statements of that. Still and all, there are some nice enough turns of phrase in it:

“…one of the things we absolutely need to agree on is the idea that we’re all allowed to question authority. We have to agree that it’s not unpatriotic to hold our leaders accountable and to speak out.”

... [More]

Oil prices are at an all-time high. Summer’s coming up, so don’t expect a dip anytime soon. The US is threatening war with Iran, the war in Iraq is dragging on and the Saudis are scrabbling to maintain control over an ever-more-agitated populace. Prices are going nowhere but up. This makes the “car culture” deeply ingrained in American culture (and growing quickly in Europe as well) problematic. The notion that everyone has a car has led to decades of residential design depending on just that... [More]

Get Your War On (MNFTIU) is frequently funny, occasionally published comic that’s featured on earthli several times. Every once in a while, they pack a serious wallop into a short rant, as in the following comic:

The quote is repeated in text form below, ‘cause it just makes me laugh:

“Sorry—after three years in Iraq, I don’t get excited by the word “progress”. That’s some bullshit. Maybe I’d be excited by progress if we had only spent, like, two million dollars, or if we had a bunch of... [More]”

Serious Sam Suicide BomberThe commuter rag[1] on the Swiss train today ran a small article about Iran’s army of suicide bombers, which was recently on display in a military parade. They marched by with their dynamite wrapped about their torsos and their detonators held high. 40,000 strong they are. These lethal forces are poised to deploy to 29 key points in Britain and the US if Iran’s nuclear facilities were to be bombed. Fully 1,300 bombers per attack point—they’d be kind of hard to miss, no? Anyone who’s played one... [More]

The Trouble With EM ‘n EN… (A List Apart) discusses how to create proper punctuation characters in online documents—specifically HTML. Of most interest are the rules of use for “em” and “en” dashes:

em dash

“…used to indicate a sudden break in thought, a parenthetical statement that deserves more attention than parentheses indicate, or instead of a colon or semicolon to link clauses.”

en dash

“used to indicate a range of just about anything with numbers … also used instead of the word “to” or a hyphen... [More]”

Final Box CoverFinal Box Back

History of the HTML Canvas

When Apple shipped Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” last year, it included the Dashboard and Widgets. Widgets are almost completely platform-independent, built with HTML, JavaScript and CSS and the Dashboard is a desktop-sized layer that could be called up instantly to show all installed Widgets. The “almost” above is deliberate since the release of the WebCore browser engine in Tiger included special hooks through which scripts could call system utilities (like executing local... [More]

With his approval ratings swirling down a deeper and darker hole every day, president Bush’s handlers have decided to address at least one perceived weakness in his persona: his lack of outside input. Meeting and talking to live audiences is “an innovation for a leader who until recently stuck to scripted meetings with screened audiences”. His handlers feel that, even in a non-election settings, he needs to “show he is not afraid of criticism.” It’s the first time in five years that he has stooped... [More]

Microsoft recently released another build of Windows Vista to members of their developers network. A flurry of screenshots ensued. The system appearance, if not its feature set, is starting to stabilize and shows signs of having had input from graphic designers for this go-round. Windows Vista Screenshots (Only4Gurus) provides the latest batch in what they show to be a long line of screenshots from the various Blackcomb/Longhorn/Vista incarnations from over the years.

Initial Impression

Control Panels Gadgets!

The basic... [More]

“When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.”

Following close on the heels of their delay announcement last week, Microsoft finally dropped all pretenses and cancelled the next version of Windows entirely in a press release early this morning.

Vista was plagued throughout its many-monikered existence by delays, feature withdrawals and a heavy amount of FUD[1]. Windows Vista slips…out of sight (The Register) has a full history of the troubled software:

“Harking back to the days of the XP beta “Whistler”, which was regarded as a code cleanup and facelift... [More]”

Bush is Laughing at YouIn a move that was stunning on many levels, Bush finally vetoed a bill that the Congress had sent on for his approval. After letting over five years of pork legislation ooze its way across his desk without being in any danger whatsoever, Bush finally unleashed the mighty power of his pen to hold back a piece of legislation that was roundly viewed as a senseless waste of taxpayer money and precious time for all parties involved.

I’ll give you three guesses what it was … and the first two... [More]