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BREAKING SURF
One of the most famous National Geographic photos is a 1984 shot of a beautiful green-eyed Afghan girl. Steve McCurry, the original photographer, found her in a refugee camp in Pakistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion, and his photo was chosen for the cover for National Geographic's "100 Best Pictures" book. McCurry recently tracked down Sharbat Gula, who now lives a traditional Muslim life as a wife and mother in a remote village in Afghanistan. She agreed to be photographed and interviewed again but has decided to stay out of the limelight in the future. National Geographic has the story and then/now photos.http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/03/0311_020312_sharbat.html
Netscape Navigator's Search Snoop
Users who install Netscape Navigator 6 unwittingly also install a desktop snoop that sends a message to Netscape every time they do a search using the built-in Search button. The information collected includes the URL of the search site, the keyword search terms used, and a number that identifies the specific installation of Netscape employed. Sim IJskes first noticed the spy device after investigating why his searches at Google were redirected through Netscape's servers. Netscape blithely claims it is collecting the data just to collate activity as part of the billing process - it charges Web search sites for sending them business. Naturally, the company claims it has no interest in recording individual search activity. Still, we find it hard to believe some curious corporate data miner isn't eyeing all that data lustfully. Navigator users can avoid the Netscape's data trap by using bookmarks to link to search engines, or by archaically typing the URL directly into the browser.IJskes: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.93.html#subj9#subj9
Newsbytes: http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175035.html
Action, action, action. That's the major point of this new Star Wars trailer released this week. The pretty pictures are something to look at, but viewing them, and three earlier trailers, is a pain. You need QuickTime 5.x installed and if you prefer to view it in large format, you'll need to spring $30 for QuickTime Pro. If you visit the official Star Wars site to view these clips, you have to register with an e-mail address and risk spam, but Apple's trailers pages do not require registration. Basically, it's a pain in the ass and worth it only for true fans with broadband. Wait for the movie, and if the reviews say it doesn't suck like Episode I, then go see it. Oh yes, Jar Jar is nowhere in sight, thank goodness.
Official: http://www.starwars.com/
Apple: http://starwars.apple.com/ep2/clone_war/index.html
What do you do with 150,000 old maps? The average avid collector might just donate them to the Library of Congress. Fortunately, David Rumsey is no average avid collector. He took it a lot further, making over 6,500 high-resolution images of his historical maps of the Americas available on the Net. He even collaborated with a visualization software company to introduce the Geographical Information System (GIS) browser, which you can use in your browser or as a stand-alone Java app. With GIS, you can create customized maps, using overlays. You can experience the old maps, with their incomparable artistry, and layer modern data atop them. Cartographers and historians will find this an incredible asset to their studies. The rest of us will find it an interesting way to get from point A to point B or to blow off a few hours instead of editing our e-zine. Rumsey is working with the Library of Congress in hopes of putting even more material online. Wired has the story and Rumsey has the collection - we can't emphasize enough how amazing the material is.
Rumsey: http://www.davidrumsey.com/
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50785,00.html
Backstabbing and Intrigue Among Online Mappers
Yahoo has opted to build its own mapping system and dump Mapquest. Give it points for chutzpah. Yahoo claims that it simply wants more control over the incorporation of mapping services in its overall Web presence; it's not a competitive thing. That argument rings a bit hollow, however. People form habits. They wake up in the morning, and they drink their coffee or tea. When they want to communicate by computer, they use their groups, their ICQ, their e-mail. When they need a map, what do they go to? This looks to be a tempest a-brewing and worth a-watching. Yahoo's product is really quite good; the question is whether or not it'll catch on. It does look as though Mapquest shouldn't be resting on its laurels, or its name recognition. CNET has the story, with links to some of the players. Personally, we gave up Mapquest for Maporama months ago.Yahoo Maps: http://maps.yahoo.com/
Mapquest: http://www.mapquest.com/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-854166.html
Maporama: http://www.maporama.com/share/
"This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture." So begins a Sandia Labs report by a panel of experts who were charged with devising methods to prevent inadvertent human interference with nuclear waste disposal sites over time spans of 10,000 years. What follows is a theoretical discussion of messaging systems which would warn people not to dig around lethal waste sites, in the US and around the world. The system is not only limited to words, as the report also presents landscape designs and sculptures which are designed to convey the message. Fascinating reading.
http://www.halcyon.com/blackbox/hw/wipp/wipp.html
More Optical Eavesdropping: Monitor Glow
Last week, we reported on how LED emissions can leak network data from routers, modems, and other devices to determined spies. This week, we found a new paper that shows how its possible to get practical information from the glow of your monitor reflected off the wall behind it. Basically, you can hook up an optical sensor and watch the very diffuse glow of a monitor on the wall. The glow flickers as the CRT electron beam scans accross the phosphor to display the image. The flickering light will allow somebody with a telescope to look at the wall and get a surprisingly good image of your monitor at distances as far as 80 meters. Very clever work.http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf
Getting something for nothing is always appealing, but the impulse to get it without permission is usually controlled. Some folk, however, find that the challenge of stealing software seems to stimulate the dark side of their creativity, as Wired relates in this brief item. One thief used his iPod to download software from a computer on display. In another store, an eager employee demonstrated how to burn CDs by dragging files, including a copy of AppleWorks, from a computer onto a customer's CD-R. Another pirate settled down at the keyboard of a demonstrator computer equipped with a broadband connection and calmly mailed himself a copy of Macromedia's FreeHand 10 illustration software. Some sneaks use the memory cards of a digital camera to copy software and bypass the security devices that protect the boxed product. Lifting the product out from under the noses of inattentive store clerks may be clever and the tales thereof amusing, but theft is theft - no blurry boundaries of moral ambiguity here.
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,50910,00.html
Michael Green's Grammy Night Jivin' and Wailin'
Some in the recording industry just keep hitting on a specific theme, as if they had a tune like the theme from "Gilligan's Island" that just keeps replaying in their heads. The recurrent issue involves the supposed damage done by peer-to-peer networks such as Napster, KaZaA, and Gnutella. Michael Green, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, recently claimed that the downloading of music was basically killing the artists. To prove his point, he showed a bit of video during the Grammy celebrations that depicted three young people downloading music left and right. But if these kids were doing what Green claimed they were doing, they were violating federal law. He or others in the industry apparently put the teens up in the Biltmore Hotel and paid them around $12 an hour to do it, so one kid claims. One of these partners has noted that their progress was nowhere near what Green claimed and that the downloaded music was exchanged between private individuals rather than downloaded off publicly accessible servers. By the way, breaking the law to show it can be done is still breaking the law, and is subject to full penalties. The New York Times has the interview.Green speech: http://grammy.aol.com/features/speech.html
Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/07/arts/music/07POPL.html
Europe's Turn to Tussle with Copyright Law
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was the American implementation of the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) international copyright treaty. WIPO's 1996 treaty brought us such special features as the outlawing of efforts to circumvent encryption or to develop tools to do so. The US has already seen the effects of its legislation; now, it's the European Union's turn to fashion legislation from the treaty. This is going to be fun. The Financial Times article gives a nice summary of the issues.WIPO Treaty: http://www.wipo.org/eng/diplconf/distrib/94dc.htm
Financial Times: http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=FT33UMG1GYC&live=true&tagid=FTDDMJNIFEC&Collid=FTDMBQ131FC
Instant Messenger Spam Growing Due to New Software Tools
CNET notes anectodal evidence that the amount of spam sent to instant messenger (IM) accounts is growing. It attributes the growth to the creation and availability of two new applications that facilitate such spamming. MassMess is both an application and a "service" allowing subscribers to send spam to as many as a million users for $300. ICQIS can spam ICQ users who are online and filter them by interest, country, city, occupation, age, gender, and language. AOL, whose AOL IM users are prime targets, is not amused and has started to deploy defences. A Junkbusters spokesman says in the article that the IM spam situation reminds him of the early days of e-mail spam when Sanford Wallace set up the first spam factory. Now that the mass IM spam applications have demonstrated their effectiveness, it's only a matter of time before new variants appear and another spam/anti-spam arms race breaks out in the IM arena.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-857637.html
MassMess: http://www.massmess.ru/
ICQIS: http://www.icqis.com/
This week's ICANN meeting in Ghana is a good excuse to point you to the latest How Many Online survey from NUA. Wired also looked at the survey, which presents some fairly dismal numbers for Internet usage in Africa. The continent does have a small and vibrant Net scene, but poverty and the lack of infrastructure inherently limit the spread of technology there. It's hard to think about owning a computer when your monthly income is $40, never mind that electricity is only on for a few hours per day. The country with the highest per capita of Net connections is the Seychelles. with 7.6% of its population going online. That's only 6,000 users. Mauritius, another small island nation, is close behind. South Africa ranks third overall but leads countries in continental Africa with 5.53% where only Namibia, Gabon, and Tunisia even reach 1%. Contrast that with 60% in Seattle. Wired has other interesting numbers in the story.
NUA: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/africa.html
Wired: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,51019,00.html
The Fairness of Domain Dispute Resolution
Is the domain registration dispute system broken? If you accept the findings of Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, then there's something rotten in ICANN. Geist observes that in domain disputes, two of the four domain arbitrators - the World International Property Organization (WIPO) and the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) - choose judges that side with the trademark holders far more than with the other party in disputes. In turn, this preference for the complainant generates more revenue for WIPO and NAF. It's a complicated but important issue that will surely be covered a great deal as ICANN prepares to meet in Ghana and discuss the dispute resolution mechanism. An article in the Register summarizes an awfully complicated report.Geist: http://udrpinfo.com/
Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/24318.html
Several people have reported strange goings on in their Windows XP computers. Random letters and words appear in documents, files get opened, toolbars pop up unbidden. It's as if the computer needs the services of a MCSE, a Microsoft Certified System Exorcist. No doubt after some moments of puzzlement, Microsoft figured it out. Some computer vendors turn on speech recognition by default. When this is on, the computer is listening through its microphone and it will pick up snippets of conversation or just noise and will interpret these as text or commands. NewsBytes has the hilarious story; Microsoft has the fix.
NewsBytes: http://www.newsbytes.com/news/02/175108.html
Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315765;en-us;Q315765
It's been all over the news, so you already know that the US now has a color-coded terror alert system. In case you're wondering, the US is in condition yellow. Being a superpower with plenty of enemies, the country will never be in anything less then condition yellow, which makes the blue and green bits totally superfluous. Anything higher then condition yellow is basically a police state, which makes orange and red entirely superfluous since discussing those colors will get you arrested for disclosing the state of national preparedness to potential enemies. It's yellow. Get used to it.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020312-1.html
ONLINE CULTURE
Porn Clown Public Display Tests Photo Consent
Do you dress up like a nightmare porn clown and participate in public events? If you do, do you realize that anyone can take your picture and post it on the Net? That's what San Francisco porn clowns Ouchy the Clown and iKandi have come to understand the hard way. No law prevents someone from taking your picture while you are in public - and posting it online. If you are parading about at a social function of one kind or another with the goal of being seen, be prepared - well, to be seen and photographed. If you don't want your parents to know about your private life, don't express it in public. It's a new world of digital cameras and broadband connections out there and your most embarrassing moments are going to be online and accessible by strangers all over the world. Salon has more.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/07/photo_privacy/index.html
For some reason, the country of Ladonia has attracted lots of attention in Pakistan lately. About a month ago, Ladonia's Web site began to get e-mail from Pakistanis who were asking about becoming citizens. Unfortunately for the would-be citizens, Ladonia is only a Web site pretending to be a country, a project created by Swedish artist Lars Vilks. Vilks originally created Ladonia in 1996 to protest Swedish officials' attempts to remove some of his large abstract artworks from a location in southern Sweden. Vilks was "surprised and upset" that people had been attracted to his mock country, so he temporarily shut down the citizen application page at his site (it's back up). Meanwhile, nobody has any idea why Ladonia became so popular in Pakistan, but we can confidently predict that it's only a matter of time before somebody less principled than Vilks uses a similar set-up to start scamming people out of money. CNET has more.
Ladonia: http://www.ladonia.net/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-857045.html
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Whitney 2002 Biennial Exhibition
Every two years, the Whitney Museum of American Art puts on a special show. This year's exhibition features contemporary American art from 113 artists or groups and pretty much monopolizes the New York museum's public spaces. During the exhibition, the princely Bucksbaum Award, with its $100,000 cash and 2-year artist's residency prize, will be presented to one of the artists on display in this year's exhibit. For us folk peering in through online connections, the Whitney provides the Art Port, which features ten intriguing Web exhibits. Among the clever and thought provoking online art are James Buckhouse's "Tap", a virtual interactive dancer for PDA or PC with a life of its own, Benjamin Fry's "Valence" data visualization, and Robert Nideffer's "Proxy", a different view indeed of the Internet. Also included is Josh On & Futurefarmers' "They Rule", which maps how corporate directors form an interlocking network that connects just about everything - we have more to say on that one elsewhere. Overall, its a great show.Whitney: http://www.whitney.org/index.shtml
Art Port: http://www.whitney.org/artport/exhibitions/
We've been engaged in struggles of our own, albeit nonlethal ones in cyberspace, so we're a bit late in reviewing Art of the First World War, which commemorates the 80th anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. Under the rubric of UNESCO and various historical and art museums in Europe, this multilingual site is a collection of 100 wartime paintings by 54 artists. You'll recognize some of the names, such as Picasso and Chagall. Others are almost forgotten, in part because their work evokes pain and suffering. You're unlikely to breeze through this site, in light of the enormous conflict it depicts, even though most of its pages are short, as if the creators knew you'd only be able to stomach a little at a time. The Foreword would make an excellent - and chilling - summary for a class in modern art or history. One irony is that some painters worked near the front lines to "make landmarks disappear and targets unidentifiable. They were employed in removing the last chance of pictorial representation." Drawers and painters also had to compete with photographers (much in demand by newspapers) and cinematographers. The Great War has repercussions - and occasional percussions - to this day. Even decades and distance cannot prevent shudders of horror.
http://www.art-ww1.com/
Tripping the Rift - a Comic Space Opera
The adventures of an alien, a woman, a robot, and a clown - that's what all of this is about. Their vessel: the Free Enterprise. The animation is quite well done, not surprising when you learn that these folks have worked on projects such as the popular "King of the Hill". They have heavy hitters doing the characters' voices, as well, in Terry Farrell ("Becker", "Star Trek: DS9", etc.) and Stephen Root ("King of the Hill", "Newsradio", etc.). Despite the roots, this isn't some sanitized, made-for-TV product - hardly a sentence passes without an expletive and the woman sports a supersized Playmate body, of course, and primarily wears see-through outfits. You'd do well to have a broadband connection and a lot of hard disk space - the first episode runs six minutes and consumes about 35 MB of disk space. The one-minute teaser for Episode Two takes around 5 MB of space. Episode One can be downloaded in either MPEG or DivX format; the teaser's in MPEG only.http://www.trippingtherift.com/
Amazing Metal Sculpture You've Seen - but Don't Realize It
You may have seen his shoes, the three-foot-high stilettos. Maybe you caught some of his pieces in a commercial or in an Austin Powers movie. Bruce Gray's sculpture runs the gamut from whimsical to sublime, but never deigns to call itself normal. For instance, he makes a paper airplane in stainless steel. For $500, you can get a steel piggy bank - but if you then don't have anything left to put in the piggy bank, it's sort of a "Gift of the Magi" version of "Catch-22". Proving that art is made up of a variety of media of which each artist has a specialty, Gray's Web page could be more innovatively designed or arranged more with the end user in mind but it's obviously fulfilling its task since he's receiving thousands of hits a day.http://www.brucegray.com/
We've all used this phrase at one point in our life, as long as we've done some deductive math: Quod Erat Demonstrandum, QED. While we're not quite sure what he's proved here, Bartlomiej Jurkowski seems to have quite a bit of whatever it is to prove. His gallery is chock full of creepy Bryce images. You know how rendered images sometimes come out a weird combination of a little too real and not quite real enough at the same time? This definitely qualifies. Sometimes the images are hauntingly real, and sometimes they're hauntingly unreal. It helps to know Latin if you want to interpret the image names, but it's definitely not a requirement for enjoyment of the site.
http://www.ics-studio.com.pl/qed/indexa.htm
Amnesty International's Shiny Art and Donations Site
Amensty International needs your support. Rather than simply ask for money or send you more of those snail-mail return-address labels, the human rights organization is using cutting edge digital art as a come-on. The art site, called Shine, is as impressive as it is difficult to use. Oddly, or maybe not, the easiest thing to do is donate money - viewing the art requires a little more effort.http://www.shine02.org/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
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The Doomsday Scenario: How America Ends
Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution
A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity: A Novel
The Art of Cartooning with FLASH (With CD-ROM)A Daily Taste of Opinion from the WSJ
The editorials of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) are well known for their strong conservative slant. It's not all that well known that the paper's straight news sections are quite even-handed and highly respected. The WSJ does news good. It also charges for access to its daily online edition. If you don't want to pay for the real thing, the WSJ Opinion Journal site gathers the best of the daily news stories from the world's press, sorts them roughly by topic and area of the world, and adds its own dose of attitude along with links to the originals. The page usually slants toward foreign affairs, but every day's content is different and the main thrust varies. The page is always a lively and informative read. The writers are skilled at getting and keeping your interest.http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/
My Fare City: A Cabby's Diary After Dark
In NSD 4.09, we wrote of cabby Bud Carson and tales of the wild cabby life in San Francisco. From the degree we liked his online journal, you'd think it would make a good book. It does. "My Fare City" is for sale at Amazon, and for some occult reason (consistency? hobgoblin? minds?) it didn't wind up in our Recommendations section. Never mind, we really do like it.Carson: http://www.realtaxicabstories.com/
My Fare City: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1401020194/netsurferdigest
SURFING SCIENCE
Great Balls of Fire! And Ready in Just Seconds!
Yes, you can do this at home! All you need is a microwave oven, the simple devices detailed on this site, and the ingenuity and lack of sense and safety of a college student with too much time! As the page explains, what you'll be creating, besides havoc inside a microwave, isn't really lightning, but a flaming ball that behaves somewhat the way Mother Nature's non-microwave lightning behaves. The page starts with a cogent and coherent description of the phenomenon and rapidly moves on to technique. Our reviewer was just about to try the recommended technique when the local spousal unit threatened a retaliatory experiment involving inertia and broomsticks. If you feel compelled to replicate the science here, be very careful and don't stand in front of the microwave while creating ball lightning within. Also wear eye protection and consider good insurance, body armor, and the singles life.http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/cwillis/microwave.html
Mercury Rising: a Photo-Documentary on Climate Change
OneWorldJourneys has created a visually exciting multimedia site that explores global warming. The site focuses on climate changes in the Costa Rican cloud forest. The site shows ecologists at work in Costa Rica and in the lab, answers viewer questions, and explains the myriad phenomena. The lowband and broadband versions of the site differ in levels of visual sophistication, not in content quantity and quality. Our reviewer came away impressed and much more of a believer in global warming than he had been.http://www.oneworldjourneys.com/climate/
Sure, a Web site entitled Pharmaceutical Achievers might appeal to the less salubrious of our culture, the underbellies, the desperados who only see the word "drugs" when they go to a drug store. But this is classy stuff. Celebrating scientists who have done some sterling work for the industry, while creating a resource for schools, this site provides up-to-the-minute details about some of the industry's top science dudes and dudettes. We visited "Aspirin Intrigue", which sounded very James Bond, but was actually cooler on a completely different level that didn't involve any wisecracks at all. Did you know doctors used to prescribe heroin to babies to cure colic? That's just an early tidbit. The unadorned history of the pharmaceutical industry and the creators that have changed society are all detailed here. Download some street smarts now.
http://www.chemheritage.org/EducationalServices/pharm/pa/home.htm
Fun Time Science (and Other) News
Fun Time News is hardly slick. In fact, the home page of this gateway is mostly a list of links in the Web fashion of 1995. That may be the point. All you need is something to catch your eye, to pique your curiosity, and off you go to a real news or scientific site. Having seen "Jurassic Park", how could you ignore a link to "Ferocious dinosaur a slowpoke?" In the same spirit of research, we just had to follow the link to "Man evicted because he laughed too much". What does this February item from Reuters have to do with science? Not much, but it was fun while it lasted. Visit this site on a slow day, and you might not wonder why "Asian women love e-mail" got sandwiched between "Mercury astronauts celebrate 40 years of orbital flight" and "McDonald's Opens Snowmobile Drive-Through". There's no About page to give you background or insight into editorial decision. That's a minor fault. The selection of news stories is broad enough to attract people with a modicum of interest in science and technology. (There are links to sport and kids' sites, too.) You can browse seven or eight categories on sub-pages. Homepage headlines, though, are more likely to keep you coming back. Don't expect perfection. We were disappointed we couldn't access MSNBC's article "New calculations predict billions of earth type planets could be out there". What goes around comes around, however, and Fun Time News will likely have a link - hopefully, a working link - to the sequel.http://www.funtimenews.com/
A Simple Lesson in Beginner Astronomy
Thanks to the Web, amateur astronomy gets easier, at least in the early stages of learning. This site is an educational site with a screen-by-screen, step-by-step approach. You start with a lesson in identifying Orion (a piece of cake in isolation but more difficult among surrounding stars) and then, in the constellation's right armpit, Betelgeuse. (OK, the site is slanted for ignoramuses in the northern hemisphere, but there are a lot of us here.) In a minute or two, you learn to identify Betelgeuse among more than 600 stars. Cheaters will mouse around till they find the star. Next, you identify the Big Dipper and Polaris, then learn how to find north with Polaris. We learned that during the American Civil War, fugitive slaves used Polaris to guide their escape to Canada. Then it's on to Cassiopeia and back to Orion, then on to Jupiter.... The best thing about this site is repetition - it asks you to click on the same star or constellation again and again, in different views. Clearly, this is the kind of interactive site you want your seven-year-old to visit so he or she can point out stars to you next time you look at the night sky together.http://www.visitingmoon.org/betelgeuse/
SOFTWARE
At the dawn of the latest release of Mozilla, version 0.9.9, Salon is running an article that underscores what's been well known in the open source community for the last few months - Mozilla these days is a stable, feature-packed, industrial-grade browser. Given its long and problem-plagued history, it's no wonder most people still think of it as a bloated, buggy piece of software that called into question the efficiency of the open source process. Bloated it might be, but it's no longer bug riddled and is truly a viable piece of software. Read Andrew Leonard's story for his take on the issue.Salon: http://www.salon.com/tech/col/leon/2002/03/12/mozilla/index.html
Mozilla: http://mozilla.org/releases/mozilla0.9.9/
Our editor (that would be Laurie - Arthur is a Unix geek from way back) finally decided to give OS X a good run-through. Bottom line? He likes it. It took a few days to get used to the different file-storing paradigm - OS X really focuses on multi-user set-ups, and he was initially confused over how to keep his traditional filing structure. In the end, he decided it would be more time-effective over the long haul to learn the concept of a home directory separate from shared apps and whatnot. He tried using the OS X's native Mail client, but it just didn't offer the shortcuts and convenience of Eudora, so he got Eudora 5 looking like Eudora 3 and is using that now. The most obvious feature of OS X is that it just looks pretty. Apple did a good job of incorporating text anti-aliasing. It's just gorgeous. Another thing to get used to is the lack of the old System Folder. OS X uses Library folders that make us feel less in control, but the actual operation is smoother: no unrecoverable crashes after two weeks of heavy use. OS X 10.1.3 seems slower than OS 9 but multitasks better, so it's probably a draw in speed. There are some minor drawbacks. Custom system sounds from OS 9 won't work as OS X system sounds and there's no shareware app to properly convert them. Similarly, some fonts won't show up in some apps. Our editor also misses spring-loaded folders. Lastly, the Finder won't retain folder view settings, which is a minor annoyance. Overall? B+, and he's keeping it as his main OS.