Word is spreading on the blogosphere about some new Windows Vista screens, the claim being these are of the new user interface Microsoft will be rolling out with RC1, here are some of the screens in question: We see the old style Sidebar, which was dropped in favour of the new one, we see the old Media Player gadget which Microsoft said they wouldn't be shipping, and we see some really fat chunky title bars....
From Another World is Possible, the blog of John McDonnell MP, who, if we have our way will be future leader of the Labour Party: Reports have appeared this morning confirming what many of us suspected. The Bush regime is interfering in the Venezuelan elections in an attempt to depose President Chavez. Funds are being deployed by the US to mobilise support against Chavez. This is an unacceptable act of imperialist inteference in a foreign country which must be condemned by democratic governments across the world....
I installed the 5536 build of Windows Vista on my Toshiba Portégé M200 Tablet PC just the other day. One thing I noticed almost straight away was that in the Appearance Settings dialog Windows Aero was not only available but actually worked. The M200 has a way below-spec graphics card to run Aero Glass only 32MB of on-board memory and a DX8 part. In previous builds it would simply revert back to the basic theme....
The IAU have just in the last few hours voted on the definition of the word planet. The new definition removes Pluto from the family of planets and places it into a new category of dwarf-planets. Here is resolution 5a: The IAU therefore resolves that planets and other bodies in our Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way: (1) A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit....
From the BBC: US space agency NASA has named its new manned exploration craft Orion. The vehicle is being developed to take human space explorers back to the Moon and potentially then on to Mars. It is hoped the name Orion could eventually mean as much for manned space exploration as Apollo did in the 1960s and 1970s. Its first manned flight - to the International Space Station - will take place no later than 2014 and its first flight to the Moon no later than 2020....
Talk about depressing. The following is the result from a poll asking "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." the results are below: America managed to beat Turkey but that is all... Well done America. I'm sure most of you can guess the reason, right? The total effect of fundamentalist religious beliefs on attitude toward evolution (using a standardized metric) was nearly twice as much in the United States as in the nine European countries (path coefficients of -0....
Man I've just watched some more of Apple's WWDC and I want to touch some more on Time Machine. The Apple fan boys commenting on my other entries made it seem like Time Machine was some kind of "advanced" and "modern" feature. Well its not, I was joking when I said it was like Backup from Windows 95, but after watching it, IT IS like Backup from Windows 95. All it does is make a copy every 24 hours of your files onto another hard drive (yes you need another hard drive, in Windows 95 you could backup to anything)....
In August 2003, August 2005 and now apparently in August 2006 an e-mail has made the rounds claiming Mars will be as big as the Moon. What's worse is its basically the same e-mail with just the year changed. It is false, even when it was the right year. Mars was pretty close in August 2003 - even a bit closer than in 1971, however the difference is tiny over the average, the Hubble Space Telescope wouldn't even be able to tell the difference....
Well I've just managed to sit through a bit of Steve Job's address at WWDC. As always he likes to start off by bashing Microsoft. He was pointing out how little progress Microsoft have made in the last five years, stating that Apple has shipped five major releases for Mac OS X. Five commercial upgrades at $129, the first Jobs admitted was just to make the broken original release. That comes to about $650 + tax, ouch....
As Ted Grant passed away just recently, I thought it would be a good time to point out the organisation of which he was a member, The Militant and probably their greatest single achievement. An achievement beyond the dreams of the dozens of left-wing sects of today. In 1983, Labour won the elections of Liverpool City Council with 49 councillors, over the years one died of illness and one was killed, generally known since as the Liverpool 47....