The first teaser trailer for "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" will make its theatrical debut with Pixar's "The Incredibles" on Nov. 5. Members of the official Star Wars site, however, can watch the full teaser beginning on Nov. 4 in QuickTime format. This is not the first time that Lucasfilm and Pixar have teamed up. In 2001, the trailer for "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones" could be seen in theaters prior to the showing of Pixar's Monsters, Inc. Apple CEO Steve Jobs purchased Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for US$10 million and formed Pixar in 1986.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004 at 07:13 JST
TOKYO — An Orient Thai Airways chartered jumbo jet passed within 200 meters of the tip of Tokyo Tower in the early hours of Sept 19, Ministry of Transport officials said Monday.

TBS news reported that the jet, bound for Haneda Airport, veered off course at 12:20 a.m. after the pilot was given clearance by traffic control at Haneda to locate the airport with the naked eye rather than by radio beacon.

The plane was supposed to come in over Tokyo Bay but instead crossed over Tokyo Station and the Nihombashi district, flying at an altitude of 540 meters. Tokyo Tower stands 330 meters tall.

TBS quoted residents in Higashi-Azabu as saying they could hear the roar of the jet for about 10 seconds.

Orient Thai officials admitted the error, saying the pilot had not been familiar with Japanese flight manuals and landing procedures.

The deadliest typhoon in a decade has raced across Japan, killing at least 48 people and injuring 200 while another 33 are reported missing.

Typhoon Tokage reached speeds of 229 km/h (142 mph) as it battered the south-west, forcing thousands to evacuate amid the threat of mudslides.

At its peak, it stretched across an 800km (500 mile) radius.

Parts of the south, especially in Miyazaki Prefecture, were virtually shut down with public schools closed and transport services suspended.

More than 50,000 households had no electricity while another 110,000 people were forced to evacuate, according to broadcaster NHK.

Almost 1,000 domestic flights were cancelled, affecting some 127,000 passengers.

10 the Magic Number

Today, the OpenStep API celebrates its 10th anniversary. What started out as a joint adventure of NeXT and SUN to define an application development standard that would run on all machines, making "write once compile everywhere" a reality, is still unfolding within the vivid and active community of GNUstep, old NeXT and Apple lovers.

The magic 10 appears in GNUstep's current 1.10.x release and in Apple's MacOS X "Cocoa" release. Programmers worldwide can develop their programs on Mac OS, Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, and with a couple of hurdles -- even on Windows. This solid and well-defined standard is reaching out to the world of software development, slowly but surely.

Program your applications in days or weeks, rather than years or never. Use the advanced API of a development framework that hasn't needed significant modification for 10 years, because it rocks, is stable and just works.

You want to know more? Visit the links below:

• GNUstep Home
  
• GNUstep-brochure.pdf
  
• Booklet.pdf
  
• GNUstep lmf article
  
• OpenStep Info
  
• Apple Docs
  

Spyware’s explosive growth has become a “very alarming trend” that could scare away computer users and undermine the industry, Michael George, general manager of Dell Inc.’s US consumer business, said last Friday.

Spyware, code that allows outsiders to monitor computer activity, now affects about 90 percent of computers, he said.

“It’s not just an annoyance,” George said. “Increasingly, it’s becoming more and more pernicious. It can degrade a system’s performance to the point of being unusable, it can block access to the Internet, it can prevent you from accessing e-mail (and) it can redirect your browser to some other home page.”

With spyware spreading so rapidly, nearly four users in ten say they feel less secure operating their computers today than a year ago, according to a nationwide poll that Dell and the nonprofit Internet Education Foundation (IEF) released Friday.

[stripped, fast forward]

In July, Dell began offering tech-support services for customers willing to pay $39 per incident for diagnostic help in fighting spyware. George declined to say how many people have paid the fee, but said “demand has outstripped capacity.”

Addressing spyware attacks is both expensive and time consuming because each caller could have as many as 200 spyware programs downloaded onto his computer, he said.

$39 per incident? Folks, just 33 incidents (achievable in about 9 seconds on a Windows box) equals the cost of a new Apple iMac G5 running Mac OS X. Name for us anything else in history where people clung to the obviously inferior product and paid extra for the privilege of doing so?

• A Bitter Apple Replay? from BusinessWeek Online.
  
• Why 2004 Won't Be Like 1984 from Daring Fireball.
  

Q: Speaking of security, Internet Explorer has had well-publicized holes …
Gates: Understand those are cases where you are downloading third-party software.

Q: Yes, but will people continue to do that with Media Center?
Gates: You might well do it. We need to use approaches that block people from ever getting software onto the machine they don't want.

Q: Might you add anti-virus/spyware protection in Windows?
Gates: It's not a thing you build in. You have to offer a service. There are third parties who are doing a good job. We're always taking a hard look, but we don't have any concrete plans.

Q: There is talk of a Google browser. Internet Explorer has had its security woes. How do you keep users?
Gates: More has been invested in making IE secure than any browser on the planet by a long shot. Nothing is going to change. That's the one over 90% of people are going to keep using.

"iTunes has done a great job of helping to elevate the [digital music] market," said Christine Andrews, lead product manager of MSN. "We're different because Apple is a closed system. If you want Apple, you have to use the iPod. A lot of people want choice and we offer that."

"In its response, Apple said its products remain the favorite among consumers. 'Ninety-two percent of customers buying hard-drive based music players are choosing iPods, and over 65 percent of customers buying any type of portable digital music player including flash-based players are choosing iPods,' Apple said in a written statement. 'This means that the iTunes music store, with its catalog of over 1 million songs, works with 65 percent of all MP3 players and 92 percent of all hard-drive based music players being sold today. There is a lot of customer choice happening today, it's just that Microsoft doesn't like the choices customers are making,'"

"When we go to create new machines every year, there are tools out there that we can use to burn an image onto a server then onto 15 to 20 laptops at a time," he said about the PC computers. "In the Mac world, they don't have anything like that, they have to be reloaded individually every year."

Macintosh computers are also much more expensive to maintain, Mr. Kaufman said.

"It's cheaper. There's a more competitive edge with a PC base and I can get more laptops with less money," he said.

The school district plans on converting one elementary school each year, Mr. Kaufman said. The Macintosh laptops from Woodland school are not going to waste. "We're cycling the left over laptops to the other schools," Mr. Kaufman said.

Obviously, for the Monroe school system, the choice to change from Macs to PCs is theirs to make, but we feel that the change will ultimately turn out to be a tough lesson for them in the real world of PC computing. We wish them the best of luck.

Nearly three years have passed since Microsoft Corp. released the last full version of Windows, the Redmond company's most important and profitable product. But when Bill Gates takes the stage tomorrow morning at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, he won't be launching a new generation of the flagship operating system.

He'll be looking to stir up some new interest in the existing one.

Microsoft is expected to use the event to unveil a series of new and overhauled digital media products, including a revamped version of its specialized software for watching and recording television and other digital media on a computer.

Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

What is the biggest business blunder in the past half-century? That's easy: Steve Jobs's decision not to license the Macintosh operating system, which cost Apple $559 billion (going by peak market values). Apple had, and probably still has, a better OS than Microsoft's. Instead of leading a $23 billion also-ran, Jobs could have been Bill Gates, with a company worth $582 billion. But Jobs failed to foresee the Mac OS's decline and to take appropriate action: Give in to the inevitable and license the thing.


You can't really blame him. Those who invent something are always the last to part with it. Fortunately for Microsoft, Gates did not invent the original DOS operating system, but bought it. What is bought is easily sold (or, in the case of Windows, leased). It's up to the knowledge chief to cast a cold eye on the future, gather unbiased intelligence on emerging threats and opportunities, and make the tough recommendations to buy, hold, or sell.

Actually, the best time for Apple to license the Mac OS (mid - late '80's) came at a time when Steve Jobs was not even with the company. Bill Gates' famous memo imploring Apple to license the Mac OS was sent on July 29, 1985 to Apple CEO John Scully and head of technology for Apple, Jean Louis Gasse, not Steve Jobs. Jobs had been stripped of all duties at the company in May, 1985 and was about to resign in September to begin NeXT. Jobs probably never even saw the memo. So, while Apple's refusal not to license the Mac OS was perhaps the biggest business blunder of the past half-century, it was Sculley's and Gassee's blunder, not Steve Jobs'. We think forcing Jobs out in the first place may have been an even bigger blunder.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"

There is no one-big-thing that make OS X special, but rather the every-little-thing.

OS X experience is an emergence of every-little-experience of all aspects of the system. And clearly it is greater than the sum of those aspects together.

Boids (Flocks, Herds, and Schools: a Distributed Behavioral Model by Craig Reynolds.

Whatever pleasantries once existed between Sun Microsystems and Red Hat have vanished. This won't come as a shock to many of you. The companies have been jawing in the press for some time. The extent, however, of Sun's loathing for Red Hat is more profound than many imagine, with Sun's CEO Scott McNealy largely confirming a shared attack with Microsoft against the Linux vendor.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said the based on a survey of 600 teenagers, Apple's iPod is dominating "mindshare and market share." Munster said in a research note that of all the high school students surveyed, 16 percent currently own an iPod and 24 percent plan to buy an iPod within the next year. Munster also noted that the iPod ranked fourth on the teens' holiday wish list--behind clothes, money, and a car--even though the iPod was not an answer option and had to be written in as a response.