yesterday: Outlook 2001 for Mac. I think it was just posted. I’m plenty happy with Eudora 5, but I know in some work environments this will be good news. Upon further investigation, this was announced a while back at Macworld Expo SF. Odd that I didn’t notice yesterday. My old boss would have loved me to use this (I would rather have put out my eyes). OK, not really.
I would love to see
MTBE banned, for sure. Based on what I’ve read, it’s nasty stuff – a gasoline additive that pollutes the water supply. But the story in the Environment News Service: Billion Dollar NAFTA Challenge To California MTBE Ban ignores a salient point. A US firm sued the Government of Canada two years ago on the exact same issue – a plan by Canada to ban another additive, MMT. The US firms used NAFTA to halt the new legislation in its tracks. They also threatened to sue the gov’t for billions on the same grounds as the Canadian firm is suing the Government of California. The story as it’s now being reported is smug and self-satisfied, painting Canadians as evil foreigners who aren’t quite as sensitive as enlightened Californians. Which is bullshit, just like it’s bullshit that the US is full of greedy opportunists who want to dispense with others’ national sovereignty while holding their own sacred and inviolate.
A friend passed
along a link to an interesting paper today, “The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments” by Wilfredo Sanchez of Apple. I must say I’m getting excited about OS X, the public betas of which are expected this summer. The friend who passed this along is a serious software and network engineer, so his vetting of things carries a lot of weight with me.
I think it’s pretty ironic
that the DeCSS Trial began by showing a clip of The Matrix. The matrix, in the movie, is an artificial world over which practically no one has any control – a seamless environment. Which seems pretty similar, in a way (though I know it’s more than a little disingenuous to say so), to what the Digital Millennium Copyright Act would propose. A world in which no one but the owners have any access to any media product (aka song, story, book, creative thought).
