Okay, so there really should be question marks, not exclamation points, at the end of that headline, but if you're trying to start a Mac rumor, you just can't go with question marks. It's all about projecting the confidence. ;-)

John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes that Apple had dropped the "Mac" from the name of their operating system. Evidence is this photo of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference 2008 hall, all geared up for next week's conference. It pretty clearly shows banners that say only "OS X Leopard" and "OS X iPhone" -- no "Mac" branding to be found anywhere.

That's a contrast to the last two WWDCs where all the branding was "Mac OS X Leopard." You can bet that Apple's marketing team doesn't make big glaring mistakes like "Oops, we left out a major part of the brand from all the conference signage," so it's a safe bet this is a new branding strategy. The question is why?

The easy and most expedient answer is given by the other banner in the photo, the one for OS X iPhone. Now that OS X is the underpinning for the desktop OS and the mobile OS, calling it Mac OS X is a bit bizarre since, well, the iPhone isn't a Mac.

However, they could just as easily have left "Mac OS X" as "Mac OS X" and called the iPhone flavor "iPhone OS X" or (better, IMHO) "Mobile OS X." No real pressing need to drop the Mac from the OS X brand.

The other factoid contributing to my rumor-mongering is the rumor that broke two days ago that Apple will announce OS X 10.6 (code named "Snow Leopard") at WWDC and that OS X 10.6 will be the first Intel-only release of OS X, i.e. the first version that does not support the now-legacy PowerPC processors.

Dropping the Mac-specific branding from OS X plus announcing the first Intel-only version OS X -- seems like things are nicely set up to allow for licensing of OS X to third-party hardware vendors.

OMG, OS X soon available for non-Apple hardware!!!! Extra bonus exclamation points: !!!!!

Now the New York Times has gotten hip to Garfield Minus Garfield

Not sure I agree with the rankings; they appear to skew toward 1970's era SNL, although I was LOL pleased to re-discover #3, "Robot Insurance."

But the Best Game Ever prank is by far the best prank ever. Not only does it create a public spectacle, but it brings joy to a bunch of kids by turning a random, everyday little league game into a major league event covered by NBC Sports, complete with Jumbotron, Goodyear blimp, and chest-painted fans.

[via Kottke]

PAK CHOOIE UNF!

"the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license."

A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I've had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I'm responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.

Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn't take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it's called the Internet.

The Web works by making copies of content and transmitting/distributing those copies all over hell and back anytime someone views a web page, not to mention all the caching of copies. Any company that's going to get into the business of helping you put content of any sort on the web needs to get your permission to do fling that content all over the globe.

If the vendor didn't explicitly make the license to do that part of the terms, then some other bozo is going to come along and say "I uploaded a photo to your photo sharing site, and you had the unmitigated gall to -- horror or horrors -- transmit my content to the web browser of someone, and in the process of doing so allowed them to cache a copy of that photo on their own computer! How dare you! I'm suing you for copyright infringement, Mr. Vendor!" The type of terms like those quoted above are about how the web works and making sure that some litigious jackass doesn't sue the vendor over doing what's necessary for a web app to exist. It's not about "stealing copyright."

So, you "stealing copyright" bozos, please stop getting your knickers in a twist. Put your tinfoil hat back on and wait by the front door for the black helicopters.

Oh, by the way, the quoted terms above? They're quoted from the Slashdot Terms of Service. ;-)

In a fit of scientific skepticism, we decided to calculate how unlikely Joltin’ Joe’s [56-game hitting streak] really was. Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer. In essence, we programmed the computer to construct an enormous set of parallel baseball universes, all with the same players but subject to the vagaries of chance in each one.

Although it doesn't quite set free my inner mathematician, it does bring out the writer in me, that little inner voice that says "What if . . .?"

What if one of those 10,000 alternate Joe DiMaggios -- one who was less successful in baseball and didn't marry Marilyn Monroe -- slipped through the dimensional interface into the universe where Joe DiMaggio is the baseball legend that he is in ours? Or vice versa?

Crap. Now I'm gonna have to go read a DiMaggio biography.

I know. It sounds terrible. But it actually turned out to be a big plate of spicy deliciousness.

As I sat down to eat, I wondered if I could have found a way to represent at least one more culture's cuisine in the same plate. I almost went back for the bottle of sriracha hot sauce to throw a little Thai into the mix . . . but in the end thought better of it. :-)

Glutton. For. Punishment.

It could have gone horrifically wrong. I could have gotten in way over my head, what with the HTML and the CSS and the templates and the MT settings and the repeated clicking of the rebuild button. I could have totally lost it and left the job halfway done, and you could be reading this in 12-point Times Roman on a gray background just like 1996. And it did look dicey there for about 30 minutes when I couldn't figure out why every time I rebuilt the site Movable Type insisted on not rebuilding all the archives. (Answer: set some more radio button preferences and a drop-down or two plus checking the Movable Type documentation. I hate it when I have to RTFM.)

In the end, though, I pulled it off and ordered pad thai to celebrate. The site looks . . . well, it looks like about 2003 instead of 1996. Literally. Those of you who somehow still have me in your feed reader since the days back when I was posting regularly may recognize the same green color scheme and the banner image from a previous design. Stick with what I know how to do.

A couple of years ago, I attempted a much more ambitious site re-design that did go horrifically wrong, and I wound up just slapping up some goofy black-and-orange Movable Type template that I pulled off a free template site. And there it stayed for years, sorta like the stack of boxes sitting next to my desk that I put there when I moved into my condo several years ago. (There's probably something really important and life-changing in those boxes, but it's been so long I no longer have any clue what's in there. It's like a personal time capsule. One day I'll get around to opening them up, and then it'll be all like "Ohhhh, that's where i left that coffee can full of diamonds!")

There's still some hinky stuff. One bit of hinkiness being that if you've subbed to my RSS feed, you probably got a full feed of old posts from me when you woke up this morning. Sorry 'bout that. And I'm not gonna be winning any design awards. I expect I'll want to screw around with colors and line spacing and font sizes . . . or maybe just not touch it for another two years. And, oh yeah, I haven't even looked at it in Internet Explorer yet, so it may look like ass in IE. But, really, if you're using IE, just frickin' switch to Firefox or Safari already. I'm so over you IE users and your quirks.

Anyway. There you have it: Ten Reasons Why slightly updated for the tail end of the decade, but still kicking it with the old school charm. :-)

Now all I have to do is write.

So here's the clues I picked up on.

We know Jack's father to be dead; picking up his body from Australia was the whole reason he was on the plane that crashed. Both references could be explained away by of Jack's decline into drinking and drugs.

Or . . . Jack's father is alive when he shouldn't be.

Second clue: Several episodes back in last season, in the episode titled "The Brig," Naomi falls from a crashing helicopter with a parachute. When it's explained to her that the island's inhabitants are the survivors of the crashed Oceanic flight, she says that's not possible because the crash site was found and submersible robots confirmed all the bodies were on the plane.

Again, you can explain that in various ways. Maybe it's a cover up, maybe Naomi has a reason to lie, etc.

Or . . . our crew on the island appears to be alive when they shouldn't be.

Two instances last season that reference people who shouldn't being alive as alive.

Third clue: The last episode of last season was called "Through the Looking Glass," a reference to the Lewis Carroll's indentically titled sequel to Alice in Wonderland. In Looking Glass, Alice passes through a mirror into an alternate world where everything is backwards or at least off-kilter. At least so far, the "Through the Looking Glass" episode marks a turning point in the Lost narrative structure, specifically the replacement of flashbacks of the castaways life before the island with flashforwards of some of the castaways life after the island.

Fourth clue: At the end of the "Through the Looking Glass" episode, Jack meets with Kate. Both have been rescued, and Jack is apparently not dealing with it well. He tells Kate they weren't supposed to leave and that he's looking for a way back to the island.

Conclusion: the island is some sort of nexus between parallel worlds. In the castaway's world, their plane got caught up in . . . well, whatever the event was that Desmond triggred, and that caused their plane to crash on the nexus/island. In Naomi's world, Oceanic 815 crashed into a trench and all the bodies were identified. In the world that Jack, Kate, and Hurley escape to Jack's father is still alive. And so forth and so on.

It doesn't wrap up everything in a neat little bow. Like it doesn't explain the wacky smoke clouds, the polar bears, Jacob, Locke's healing abilities, the original inhabitants, etc etc etc. But it is an operating theory. I'm now interested in going back and watching some of the old episodes to see if I can pick up on other clues.

Ah, good old, narrative analysis. It's like being an English major again. ;-)

A Dec. 30 Style & Arts column incorrectly said that the
recording industry "maintains that it is illegal for someone who has
legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer." In a
copyright-infringement lawsuit, the industry's lawyer argued that the
actions of an Arizona man, the defendant, were illegal because the songs were located in a
"shared folder" on his computer for distribution on a peer-to-peer
network.

At least they corrected it. But it reminds me that the standard print newspaper practice of burying corrections someplace deep in the paper (and, in the case, website) is as atrocious as it has always been. Corrections, especially for regular columns, should run in the same space that the original ran and run above the lede, not at the bottom of the column.

On page 15 of the brief, we find the flashpoint:
"Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed
.mp3 format AND they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the
authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs." I have capitalized the word "and" because it is here that the RIAA is making the point that placing the mp3 files into the share folder is what makes the copy unauthorized. The RIAA
is not saying that the mere format copying of a CD to an mp3 file that
resides only on one's hard drive and is never shared is infringement.
This is a huge distinction and is surprising the Post didn't understand
it.

One of my favorite bloggers, Daring Fireball's Jon Gruber, referenced this briefly yesterday. I've seen this crop up on lots of other blogs and various media outlets, and the story is always presented in basically the way that Fisher presented it:

[I]n an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

The problem is that's not what the brief says at all.

Read it for yourself. When you read the brief it quickly becomes clear this isn't a case about converting CDs to MP3s, but a case about someone who plopped his converted MP3's into the Kazaa file-sharing service. What the brief actually says is:

Defendant admitted that he converted these soundrecordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife’s use. . . . Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs. Moreover, Defendant had no authorization to distribute Plaintiffs’ copyrighted recordings from his KaZaA shared folder." (p. 15)

Note the "and" in that second sentence. This is boolean logic at its simplest. Not once in this brief -- not once -- is it even remotely implied that "copy[ing] their CDs onto their computers," as Fisher said, is an illegal act in and of itself. The entire case revolves around taking those MP3s and making them available to other people via the Kazaa file-sharing service. Had Howell just converted his CDs to MP3s and dropped them into a location on his computer that wasn't shared with millions of other users, we might assume that there wouldn't be a lawsuit taking place.

In other words, in the Atlantic v. Howell brief, the lawyers for the RIAA are not objecting to a user copying CDs onto a computer, but to a user putting the ripped audio files into a shared folder that he knew would distribute it via the Kazaa file-sharing service -- precisely what the RIAA has been objecting to for nearly a decade.

I'm no apologist for the RIAA; I loathe their policies and their tactics. But loathing the RIAA isn't an excuse for letting sloppy, misleading, and irresponsible reporting go unnoticed. I haven't seen any coverage of this case that has actually reported the full context, i.e. that the RIAA was objecting to the converted files in question being shared over the Kazaa service.

There's nothing new -- or newly nefarious -- here. The only new thing here is that the defense lawyers are being much more clever this time around about taking language about "unauthorized copies" out of context and spinning it to their advantage in the media and blogosphere. And the media and bloggers are eagerly taking the bait without doing the simple legwork that any resepectable journalist, blogger, or thinking person should do.

I did get good use out of the Nikon D50 a few months back on my vacation to California for (a) Tim & Sharon's San Francisco wedding and (b) driving down the coast in a convertible Mustang.

And yesterday I finally got around to starting to get good use out of my Flickr account via the newly released Flickr Uploadr 3.0. The Uploadr is quite nice and takes nearly all the pain out of uploading batches of photos to Flickr. (The only remaining pain is the fault of Verizon DSL, not Flickr.)

So enjoy some brightly colored San Francisco pics which make the pallette of colors in last year's vacation to Edinburgh look damn near monochromatic.

Still to come on my Flickr account: photos from last year's not-so-monochromatic trip to Nice and the driving-down-the-coast-in-a-convertible-Mustang portion of this year's vacation. And promises of more regular, non-vacation, man-about-town photos as I reclaim my creative life in 2008. ;-)