04 Oct 2005
OK, I can’t say I’m surprised by corruption in the current U.S. administration that is being revealed more and more these days. Between Tom DeLay’s money laundering, Bill Frist’s stock dumping, and FEMA’s no-bid contracts for Katrina cleanup, well, it’s all pretty clear evidence of the philosophical bankruptcy of the republican party, and the end of the "Republican Revolution". In other words, no big surprise.
However, even
I was surprised to read
this seemingly clear-cut case of republican operatives’ mob connections (including hitmen!):
The fraud allegedly committed by Abramoff and his business partner Adam Kidan involved a phony wire transfer they used to purchase a controlling interest in SunCruz from the company’s founder, Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis, in 2001.
Abramoff and Kidan later fell out with Boulis in a bitter business dispute that turned violent. In February 2001, gunmen ambushed Boulis on a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., highway and shot him repeatedly. On Tuesday, Florida authorities arrested three New York men with mob connections for the Boulis killing. Two of the men – Anthony Moscatiello and Tony Ferrari – had received payments totaling more than $240,000 from Kidan and Abramoff. Moscatiello, a longtime associate of the Gambino Mafia family, and Ferrari were supposedly providing food and consulting services to SunCruz – or so Kidan claimed when questioned by prosecutors. There is no evidence, however, that Moscatiello and Ferrari provided any services to the company.
Connecting the dots isn’t difficult here: Kidan and Abramoff want to get rid of Boulis, who won’t go away. Kidan and Abramoff hire Moscatiello and Ferrari with SunCruz money. Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly whack Boulis, without any motive of their own. If the Broward County state’s attorney has sufficient evidence to win convictions for a capital crime, some people will probably be talking soon in hope of avoiding the hot shot.
Just to reiterate, let’s repeat some of that last paragraph in big, bold bullets:
- Kidan and Abramoff want to get rid of Boulis.
- Kidan and Abramoff hire Moscatiello and Ferrari.
- Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly whack Boulis, without any motive of their own.
Damn. I mean, damn! It’s been clear for a while that Abramoff is a real piece of work, but this is just over the top. These are the kinds of murderous bastards that our man GWB is fronting for. Hooray for us, for putting this kind of thuggery in the White House, time and again. To quote Wanda Sykes, "You can't blame the blind man for wrecking your car when you're the one who gave him the keys."
Read on →
21 Sep 2005
The past few months have spurred lots of discussion and opinions about Mac on Intel. One thing that’s been neglected in most commentary I’ve seen is mention of Apple’s old “Box” model.
Back in the late 90s, Mac OS X wasn’t called “Mac OS X”, it was called “Rhapsody”. The developer previews ran on both
PPC Macs and normal Intel PCs. Apple spoke of different application environments that would be enabled in Rhapsody:
- The Yellow Box was the OpenStep application framework collection, which is now called Cocoa;
- The Blue Box was the legacy Mac OS 9 compatibility environment, now called Classic;
- The Red Box was the rumored (never confirmed by Apple) Windows compatibility environment that would allow Rhapsody for Intel to run Windows applications in a native environment, similar to VirtualPC, but running full-bore at native speed since no CPU emulation would be necessary.
Well, Rhapsody begat Mac OS X, and Mac OS X wasn’t going to be available for Intel. Apple stopped talking about their “boxes”, VirtualPC worked pretty well, and the world moved on. Now, the Mac is veering back toward Intel, and before we know it we’ll be running with Intel, and Microsoft will surely sell native-speed VirtualPC for running Windows…
But, what if there’s another way? What if we could run Windows apps on Mac OS X/Intel that were freed from the VirtualPC OS-in-a-window appearance? What if we could run Windows apps with something that strives toward a Mac OS X look? What I’m thinking about are the
WINE project and its offshoot,
Darwine.
For those who don’t know,
WINE (which stands for “
WINE Is Not an Emulator) is an independent implementation of a subset the win32 APIs, which most existing Windows applications are built on top of. The main purpose of
WINE is to be able to run Windows software on Linux (the Darwine offshoot targets running Windows software on Mac OS X). Both projects sport ”http://www.winehq.com/site?ss=1">screenshots showing a variety of applications running. WINE’s subset of the win32 APIs seems to be quite a large subset indeed.
WINE’s main advantages over VirtualPC are twofold: First, it doesn’t require Windows in order to run (VirtualPC actually has a Windows installation) since it’s a reimplementation of some APIs rather than a full OS. Second, Windows created by
WINE can be mixed on the screen with standard Mac windows, instead of being trapped inside another window.
Before
WINE is fully ready to provide a proper Mac experience however, there are (at least) three main hurdles to overcome:
- Incomplete APIs. WINE can run lots and lots of applications, but to be on a par with VirtualPC, it really needs to run nearly everything.
- X-Windows. The current implementation of Darwine using X-Windows for drawing. This is an obvious stepping-stone for the developers, but in the long term it needs to use standard Quartz windows.
- Windows look’n’feel. Windows applications running in WINE look like, well, Windows applications. Ideally we’d want them to look more like Mac applications. I’m not sure if there’s any simple workaround for this; My (perhaps mistaken) understanding is that win32 is usually used in a fairly low-level way, and that Windows apps (or the libraries they’re built with) actually draw most of their components themselves, including “standard” buttons, etc, so it would be difficult to give them Aqua-styled buttons, scrollbars, bevels, etc. But it seems like some things could be done to make the experience more Mac-like, perhaps by forcing menu bars to draw at the top of the screen or something.
Now, I’m sure that the WINE and Darwine teams have limited resources like most open-source projects do. But, hey, Apple has some cash in the bank, and a great team of engineers. What if they set a team to work on taking the existing WINE codebase, completing more APIs and adding some polish, to provide a smooth Windows-on-Mac experience for Mac OS X 10.5 on Intel? And then submitting most of their enhancements back to the original project? They’ve pulled similar stealth stunts before, both with building Safari from KDE code, and building the core Darwin OS with parts of various BSD UNIXes. If anyone can do it, Apple can.
What we’d end up with is a more flexible Mac OS X that would, in addition to the current APIs from Cocoa, Carbon,
POSIX, and Java, support Win32 as well. This would even further ease things for potential switchers, since even though we assume that there are equal or better Mac apps for most uses, it would be even easier for people to switch if they knew they could bring their favorite text editor or graphics package with them.
I have absolutely no inside knowledge of what’s going on inside Apple, and no idea if this concept has even been considered, let along worked on, but it seems to me like lots of people would appreciate this.
Read on →
16 Aug 2005
Just read a pretty convincing article arguing that the reason that people like dubya win elections is largely through assuming an “alpha male” pose; that above anything else, people will vote for the guy who’s best at hollering, pounding his chest, and behaving like the top gorilla.
Read on →
12 Aug 2005
Stumbled across the DTV project, which promises to provide independent internet TV. Pay attention to two key features:
- Anyone can publish video content with the Broadcast Machine PHP script.
- The published file apparently doesn’t have to be hosted on a webserver, you can share it as a bittorrent from your desktop machine. The DTV client software implements the bittorrent protocol for downloading content, and presumably sharing content as well, so as soon as your video is “out in the wild”, the clients that have downloaded it will help keep your own bandwidth usage down
Currently only for Mac, but a Windows client is apparently on the way.
Read on →
10 Aug 2005
One bit of technology that Microsoft has recently started talking to developers about is the Microsoft Shell. This is something that
may or may not be a part of the upcoming Microsoft
VISTA OS. Basically, someone at Microsoft finally decided that
DOS/Windows’ horrid built-in scripting language, as exemplified in millions of nasty
BAT files around the world, needed to be more like a
UNIX command-line.
Kind of ironic, since that old
DOS pidgin scripting language was never anything more than a really feature-poor, painfully bad imitation of 1979-era
UNIX.
This is where Microsoft Shell steps in, bringing things such as reasonable syntax and (hopefully) complete command i/o redirection and piping, just like
UNIX has had since the dawn of time.
UNIX advocates have long
argued the advantages of a command-line interface, mainly that it enables us to use our innate language abilities to interface with a machine, instead of just dragging a mouse around (which evolution hasn’t really built us for). So it’s great that Windows is finally stepping forward towards
UNIX in this regard. Welcome to the 80’s, Microsoft!
Read on →