I think I should get out of the habit of thinking I need a lot of stuff collected in order to post. What happens is, I just keep waiting and waiting for a good batch of stuff to assemble itself when I could just post a little here, a little there and please my ... audience (whoever that is) more often.

Other folks seem to have no problem posting a sentence or two at a time. Why should I?

Ars Technica continues their series of in-depth looks at Mac OS X with their review of Developer Preview 4. It's nice to have such smart folks share their findings, since I don't have time to play with the early builds myself. Thanks to them I feel much more clued-in now.

Laurel's TV Picks now have their own, easy-to-remember domain: http://www.tvpicks.net/

I find them very useful in planning what (few) programs to watch.

A funny User Friendly from a little while ago (even if you don't know the backstory)

More funny-ha-ha:

• Harper's Index Index [Modern Humorist, seen on Monkeyfist]
  Months after its inception that the Harper's Index began listing its sources : 11
  
  Months after the French Revolution that the Harper's Index began listing its sources : 2,336

Funny-sad:

• How one fictional congressman influenced the Internet tax debate [Nando, seen on MrBarrett]
  ...imaginary Congressman [Tony] Schnell ... supposedly was sponsoring a bill to let the government impose a 5-cent fee on every e-mail message sent, with the proceeds to go to the Postal Service.
  
  When that rumor made the Internet rounds more than a year ago, the Postal Service dismissed it as fiction and said it would not support such legislation if there were such a proposal.
  
  Then a variation made the Internet circuits, saying that the Federal Communications Commission sought to impose per-minute charges on users, which the FCC denied. That persisted, too.

It bears repeating, apparently:

If you get an e-mail exhorting you to take action against something alarming, make sure you can verify the alarming thing's existence independently before you go passing it along. If you can't, consider the possibility that somebody just made it up.

Biological metaphor that sort of works:

• Contagion: Why Our Dependency on Microsoft Makes Us Susceptible [O'Reilly, via multiple sources]
  Several of you have taken me to task for my comments about Microsoft software quality. I don't say these things to bash MS -- I say them based on over a dozen years of experience and research in infosec issues. Quite simply ... Microsoft products are ones that continue to exhibit security flaws ... and it is Microsoft's design decisions and products that result in problems such as ... the "love bug,"...
  
  Couple this with the nearly total Windows population in some environments, and we have an extremely volatile situation.
  
  Ask any biologist, doctor, historian, or agricultural specialist: what happens when you introduce a severe contagion into a monoculture population with little natural resistance? You get pandemic -- widespread infection and damage.

Gotta go work.