Freedom Force on Mac

Apple has posted a feature article on the game Freedom Force, finally coming to Mac OS X. I always thought this would be a lot of fun.

Chess Origins and a Real Holodoc

Couple of cool items caught my eye in the current issue of Discover Magazine. The first, A Strategic Advance on Europe:

A two-inch-tall ivory chess piece, part of an ancient set, suggests that traders brought the game to Europe at least five centuries earlier than previously thought.

The second, Holodeck Meets Sick Bay:

Physicist David Nolte can peer into the body using nothing but ordinary light. To the eye, skin appears opaque because it scatters almost all incoming light. But roughly one time in a million, a particle of light naturally travels into the skin and back out without scattering. Nolte and his colleagues at Purdue University in Indiana can focus in on those purely reflected photons, revealing an image of what lies beneath.

(via Jim Roepcke’s weblog)

If the National Hockey League was an ordinary multinational corporation, branch plants would be closing faster this week than you can say Nortel….Forget profits for a minute. Consider, at the quarter-pole of the 82-game NHL season, performance.

(via /.)

Ever wonder what ‘Ode to Joy’ would sound like if stretched to 24 hours? Now you can find out. 9 Beet Stretch is the result of running Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in a digital stretching program, turning the one hour piece into a 24 hour attention span acid test. Thankfully, for those of us who know our limits, it’s been cut into 19 parts.

There has been a flurry of blogging (with accompanying comments) recently, on various sites, sparked at least in part by commentary written by Nicholas Riley and John Gruber (Daring Fireball).

The following was originally a comment I left on Steven Frank’s blog under an entry he wrote (‘Zing’), in response to Gruber’s rant (‘That Finder Thing’). And just to be clear, John has some good points, but I think holding up the classic Mac OS Finder as the ultimate goal in any new UI design would be a mistake. People have been mistaking What They’re Used To for What Usability Should Be.

My rant

As far as that article goes, I’m afraid whatever valid points he might have are completely obscured by hyperbolic naysaying and pedantic ranting. And as far as his ‘solutions’ go…

Non-pedant OS 9 holdouts are holding out because they can’t afford/don’t want to upgrade their hardware, or their software hasn’t been upgraded yet, not because of Spatial Orientation. He wants to ditch the columns because they don’t fit into his spatial paradigm? All right, but, having ‘solved’ that problem, he wants to have either an entirely different application to add columns back in, or simply add columns back in to the Finder. What th—-?

In every other Application but the old Finder, Command-N creates a new window. A cardinal rule would be broken by not making a new folder something other than Command-N.

In his anti-NeXT rant, he mentions iTunes and iMovie versus iPhoto and iCal, completely missing the fact that the former pair are on their 3rd and 2nd iterations, while the latter are still 1.x releases. Does he not remember how funky iMovie 1 was? I sure as heck do. iCal sucks right now. Wait a couple of versions and get back to us.

Look, I’ve been using Macs since 1986. I have been using Mac OS X since the Public Beta. With a short adjustment period, I was able to function as fast or faster in OS X. With every new release, the OS has sped up from keeping up with me to being ready for me, and surpasses what OS 9 once was. Enhancements, both UI and otherwise, have been added apace with this operating system, giving me every confidence that they will continue to happen. And without system lockups and rogue programs eating memory, I am an order of magnitude more productive on this OS.

The article’s final shot?

‘Doable? Certainly. But I’m not holding my breath.’

Yes, he couldn’t do that and expel all the hot air necessary for his rants, could he? ;) Seriously, though, I exhaled a long time back and have loved breathing in this OS every day since.

Are there problems with it? Sure! Point me at one that doesn’t have some. Is it getting better all the time? Yes!

Can we do without feedback, both positive and negative? No way! Can we do without bitterness, name calling, and blind pedantry? I can. I hope the Fireball dares to as well.

Quark you, too, buddy!

Quark CEO reveals his contempt for his customers?

I’m still debating about whether I believe this is true or not, but sadly would not be surprised if it were. Grain of salt applied.

The CEO of Quark told a room full of customers at an executive briefing "that ‘the Macintosh platform is shrinking,’ and that ‘publishing is dying.’ He suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark’s Mac commitment should ‘switch to something else,’ although he insisted that making the move to Adobe’s long-Carbonized InDesign package is ‘committing suicide.’" As Merlin wrote, "Yeah, so all you dumbasses that talked your boss into shitcanning PageMaker in favor of our hard-to-use, never-upgraded software a few years back: Psych! So long, suckers!" Link Discuss (via Kung-Fu Grippe) (Boing Boing)

Reading Between the Lines of Nasca

(via /. science)

How the lines were made may be agreed upon, but why they were made is a whole different story. Many theories have arisen over the years as to why the drawings were made, some from scientists some from people who just like a mystery and some by pseudoscientists. Perhaps the wackiest explanation claims that the drawings are made as navigation signals to extraterrestrials visiting in spaceships. Some of the drawings, it was claimed, were apparently to park the family spacecraft on. Scientists generally chuckle and shake their heads over those type explanations, but they had also shaken their heads and been unable to agree on an alternative reason. Now though, two archeologists think they may know why the ancient Peruvians made these famous lines….

NHL Obstruction Rules Progress Report

(via Michael McCracken) Chuq Von Rospach reviews the new NHL obstruction rules in his blog.

It’s the quarter point of the NHL season, and people, as usual, are starting to chatter that the refs are giving up on the new interference rules. Such chatter is common this time of the season — and sometimes, it’s correct. Not, IMHO, this time. Please allow me a contrary view…