Universal Christmas Poo

posted by jack at 08:21 CET in / compute / mac

Did I release the very first third-party screensaver for Intel Macs? It seems like it! I released the latest version of the Mister Hankey Screensaver way back in November, compiled as a Universal Binary so that it would work on Intel Macs. I didn't have access to a developer Intel Mac, so I had a friend try it briefly and verify that it worked.

Now that Intel Macs are actually available, I checked versiontracker's Mac Intel page to see what else was out there. Imagine my surprise when I found only five other Mac Intel screensavers there, all of them released in the past couple weeks! Google can't seem to find anything else, either.

So, as far as I can tell, Mister Hankey is the first screensaver ever released for Intel Macs by a third party. Hooray!

Chomsky on the lack of a war on terror

posted by jack at 14:47 CET in / politics

Just read a mercifully short interview with Noam Chomsky. I say "mercifully short" because, as much as I admire the old guy, lots of his writings tend to be long and dense. Good to see a bite-sized piece for a change.

Some salient bits:

A large majority of the population is in favor of a national health care system of some kind. [...] But whenever that comes up [...] it's called politically impossible, or "lacking political support," which is a way of saying that the insurance industry doesn't want it, the pharmaceutical corporations don't want it, and so on.

[...] we are under a rigid doctrine in the West, a religious fanaticism, that says we must believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq even if its main product was lettuce and pickles, and the oil resources of the world were in Central Africa. Anyone who doesn't believe that is condemned as a conspiracy theorist, a Marxist, a madman, or something.

What gives me hope actually is public opinion. Public opinion in the United States is very well studied, we know a lot about it. It's rarely reported, but we know about it. And it turns out that, you know, I'm pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion on most issues.

Pass it along to your conservative friends!