Filesystems are little different from their initial inception last century. Memory, on the other hand, has gone from a state of anarchy that filesystems still reside in, to an abstracted virtualized version in all major consumer operating systems today. While hacks to the limitation of present filesystem design has been lopped onto various versions, most of these have been either horribly inaccessible (the windows registry) or geared toward protecting users from each other (permissions). Little to nothing has been done to protect one application from the next. This problem is so great that entire cottage industries have sprung up supporting these problems, with substantial emotional investment in one implementation or another; most fights about linux flavors center around package management.

We need protected/virtual filesystems. Just as processes can, today, assume they are the only process on the system, we need to allow applications to assume that they are the only application installed on the filesystem.
(more…)

Steve Ballmer may as well have said Microsoft has given up the mp3 player market

Think you can you crack the iPod market?

It’s going to take an innovative proposition. In five years are people really going to carry two devices? One device that is their communication device, one device that is music? There’s going to be a lot of opportunities to get back in that game. We want to be in that game. Expect to see announcements from us in that area in the next 12 months.

A very wise move. Apple will remain king of the MP3 players. Microsoft’s only chance is to make a play in the mp3 player/cellphone market. Still, I think Microsoft will lose this one; they should just license FairPlay from Apple–as if…

I saw Crash today. I enjoyed it very much. If one compressed all the racial conflict and tension he would experience in a lifetime down to one day spread around 10 inter-related threads, then you have this movie. It felt very spiritual and Christian as well; the movie themes an interweaving of sin, forgiveness and redemption. You come away from the music hopeful about the future but depressed about the difficulty faced in life. That this movie won best picture surprises me little.

Dvorak is right on the money:

The French are also skeptical about the whole movie-piracy phenomenon. Why should illegally downloading the equivalent of a $19 disc result in a $250,000 fine and 5 years in prison? Shoplifting a $100 item from a store—which is tangible and real—has fewer consequences. Does this make any sense to anyone? The French don’t think so. Illegally copying movies or downloading should be like a traffic ticket—perhaps a $100 fine. Now they are being accused of “encouraging” piracy. How’s that? $100 is a lot of money.

It make me ill to think Germany may start throwing pirates in jail. Why have the RIAA and MPAA put the world’s governments into a stranglehold?

CNN and NPR wish they could do this kind of reporting. Hard hitting interview on a man who embeds himself with the enemy.

How very interesting! I am awe-struck.

My new computer has a video camera. I created a trial video pod-cast concerning differences between themes common in Japanese and American story lines. Drop me a line if you are interested in watching and/or hearing it.

We spends years training children to react to other thoughts and opinion; naturally their creativity lacks as a result. There has got to be a more creative solution to encourage kids to both read and write than the tired, read a book and respond to it, method currently in use.

I love writing; I hate reading responses worse than anything. Guess which feeling dominated my opinion of my English classes?

Has anyone noticed the Green party grows more marginalized every day, while Libertarians continue their steady headway into the mainstream? Perhaps this is because Greens are hard to distinguish from any other leftist; perhaps because the right holds the minds of the American people.

This is how Mac OS X loads applications.