The new agoras: ‘Wikis’ as a form of collective intelligence

I had to take note of these excellent sounding new modules:

Shoutbox | drupal.org

Flag | drupal.org

Calendar | drupal.org

Deadwood | drupal.org

Embed widgets | drupal.org <-- lets you embed Drupal into totally different sites?!!

CAPTCHA | drupal.org

Admintools | drupal.org

File Framework | drupal.org

Yahoo Search BOSS | drupal.org

ImageField | drupal.org

Also Home | Development Seed

A little bit of Hongpong spam got away from me after a Spam module upgrade. Spam module is annoying so I am going to try Mollom, which checks all your comments through their system. It runs on Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and has development stuff for Ruby, Java, PHP5 and .Net.

Also finally Drupal 6.3 and 5.8 got released, the 5.8 is a security update and 6.3 fixes many problems with the 6 platform. Delightful - now 6.x development can finally speed ahead!

For more stuff see New Drupal Book: Drupal Multimedia!

These are my personal notes - not too useful for the casual reader, though interesting developments anyway: Reverse node reference | drupal.org

Image Assist | drupal.org

Information-Sharing using FeedAPI and Buddylist | groups.drupal.org

FeedAPI | drupal.org

Feed Element Mapper | drupal.org

Argument: Node reference (not an option in the views fields) | drupal.org

Documentation for 6.x-.x2 | drupal.org

If Firefox is too pokey, and Safari annoying, you should try Camino, which is another fork of Mozilla that is more streamlined for the Mac than Firefox. It's got pretty good performance, really. Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style

You can get a lot of usual Firefox plugins into Camino, as well.

Open source rules. For more details on the latest version, see:

Camino. Releases. 1.6.1

All right here is a new one. WikiLeaks.org got set up a while ago to offer a WikiPedia-style spot for edgy secret documents to get dumped. And they are getting some press. Now, a Situation has arisen, knocking the main server offline as their CA-based domain registrar folds under legal pressure. Because WikiLeaks was leaking.... suspicious bits about the Cayman Islands fronts of some bank or something. Apparently the UK server, among others, are still fine. Here is the list of mirrors.

Here is a list of Wikileaks Cover Name URL links which worked ok for us in the last few hours:

http://wikileaks.la/
https://secure.wikileaks.la/

http://home.e.co.za/
https://secure.home.e.co.za/

http://joburg.e.co.za/
https://secure.joburg.e.co.za/

http://new.alain.co.za/
https://secure.new.alain.co.za/

http://wikileaks.be/
https://secure.wikileaks.be/

http://stockholm.divx.se/
https://secure.stockholm.divx.se/

http://jwdc.org/
https://secure.jwdc.org/

http://ljsf.org/
https://secure.ljsf.org/

http://freedomsbell.org/
https://secure.freedomsbell.org/

http://freedomspen.org/
https://secure.freedomspen.org/

http://libertypen.org/
https://secure.libertypen.org/

http://sunshinepress.org/
https://secure.sunshinepress.org/

http://new.1.vg/
https://secure.new.1.vg/

http://zurich.base-v.ch/
https://secure.zurich.base-v.ch/

http://bratislava.iypt.sk/
https://secure.bratislava.iypt.sk/

http://new.iypt.sk/
https://secure.new.iypt.sk/

http://wikileaks.org.uk/
https://secure.wikileaks.org.uk/

http://new.ilex.cl/
https://secure.new.ilex.cl/

http://wikileaks.tl/
https://secure.wikileaks.tl/

http://freedomsbell.com/
https://secure.freedomsbell.com/

http://wikileaks.in/
https://secure.wikileaks.in/

http://bucharest.roxi.ro/
https://secure.bucharest.roxi.ro/

http://wikileaks.es/
https://secure.wikileaks.es/

http://wikileaks.ws/
https://secure.wikileaks.ws/

http://riga.ax.lt/
https://secure.riga.ax.lt/

http://special.k.vu/
https://secure.special.k.vu/

http://wikileaks.cx/
https://secure.wikileaks.cx/

http://new.it.cx/
https://secure.new.it.cx/

Some of the Cover Names presumably just re-direct traffic to the now missing www.wikileaks.org and so are effectively not working either i.e.

http://wikileaks.org.au/
https://secure.wikileaks.org.au/

http://wikileaks.de/
https://secure.wikileaks.de/

http://wikileaks.org.nz/
https://secure.wikileaks.org.nz/

Some are more peculiar in that unencrypted URLs either time out or are not working,

However, the corresponding SSL URLs work ok e.g.:

https://secure.smoke.ganja.nl/
https://secure.moskva.orts.ru/

There are some caveats about the secure proxy certificates and whatnot - I.E. what are these 'moskva orts' Russians really up to? [Something quite cool i would bet, anyway]

There is a blog here: WikiLeak.org with more news on that.

http://wikileaks.org.uk/wiki/Wikileaks_survives_censorship%2C_ddos%2C_fire :

Spy Blog: Wikileaks survives a fire, but is under Temporary Restraining Order partial censorship

Link

http://spyblog.org.uk

Country

United Kingdom

Date

2008-02-17

It looks as if the interesting and controversial, Wikileaks website, which promises "anonymous, untraceable, uncensorable" publication of leaked documents from whistleblowers, and which recently published the devastating No2ID Campaign annotated leaked UK National Identity Scheme document , is weathering some technical hitches and legal litigation attacks.

It seems that there has been a fire in an Uninterruptible Power Supply, which took the WikiLeaks web servers offline for much of Saturday, at their Swedish co-location hosting company, PRQ Inet, which has experience of attempts at censorship, through their former hosting of the peer to peer filesharing and political phenomenon, The Pirate Bay.

[editor: shortly before the fire unknown persons launched a 500Mbps distributed denial of service attack. It is not known if or how the attack is related to the other events described in this article].

More seriously and for the longer term, the brand name of WikiLeaks.org is no longer online, due to a Temporary Restraining Order issued by the California Northern District Court in San Francisco, aimed at a Domain Name Registrar, rather than just the actual publishers of controversial material, who happen to be outside of US legal jurisdiction..

See this partial public list of Wikileaks Cover Names for alternative URLs which have not yet been censored.

The plaintiffs in the California case are a Swiss Bank bank - Bank Julius Baer and its associated Cayman Islands tax avoidance subsidiaries, egged on by their expensive Hollywood media celebrity shyster lawyers Lavely & Singer. Julius Baer have been pursuing a Swiss whistleblower, some of whose leaked documents have been allegedly published on WikiLeaks.org. Why this is a problem when the world's financial monitoring and tax authorities appear to have already had access to them, is a mystery.

See Bank Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks

WikiLeakS.org have also had legal threats from ineptitude lawyers Schillings -- who in tried to censor blogs critical of the dubious Russian / Uzbek billionaire Alisher Usmanov] which caused much of the UK political and Arsenal football club fan blogosphere, to rally together in condemnation of the "collateral damage" which was to caused to innocent political bloggers, across the political spectrum.

Schillings are acting against WikiLeaks.org because of their publication of a prospectus to potential rescue investors of the Northern Rock plc bank scandal, something which is now obsolete, but was of massive public interest to all UK taxpayers and investors, and which the mainstream media caved in to after Schillings shyster threats, and an expensive (effectively taxpayer funded) High Court Injunction.

See Northern Rock vs. Wikileaks.

It is interesting that the first threats to this supposedly "uncensorable, anonymous, mass whistleblowing" project, do not come from Government Big Brother authorities, but from the private sector, and from equipment failures at a Single Point of Failure.

As with the Alisher Usmanov affair, the tactics of the media celibrity shysters in the Bank Julius Baer case is to threaten parts of what should be neutral, exempt internet infrastructure companies, with potentially expensive litigation in court rather than just the actaul publishers of the allegedly defamatory or confidential or copyright material.

Even if such companies win in court, the expense of kegal advice is such that it could cost them far more money in legal fees, than they are getting from a cheap domain name registration or webhosting package, so they are tempted to cave in to such shyster demands for censorship.

Only by pointing out the damage to their own brand names and potential profits, as a result of the disgust that most active internet customers feel, when the rich and powerful and their shysters, try to bully individuals or small groups of activists, can this economic threat be counterbalanced.

See the Censorship Threats from Lawyers category archive of blog postings on the WikiLeak.org blog, which comments on the technical, legal and ethical aspects of the WikiLeakS.org project.

The official press release: Drupal 6.0 Released - Bringing Greater Simplicity, Performance And Style To This Open Source Social Publishing Platform and in all languages: Drupal 6.0 released | drupal.org

5 Reasons you should choose Drupal for our Website | Translation Designs

What is the future of Drupal? very important!! see here: From infinite extensibility to infinite interoperability by Dries Buytaert who is the leader of the almightay drupal project:

I want the Drupal community to stay ahead of the competition. I want to start implementing today what proprietary CMS vendors will implement in 2013. From a content management system's point of view, I believe, that means (and I really hate to use the term 'Web 3.0'):

Web 3.0 = Web 2.0 + infinite interoperability

which roughly translates to:

Web 3.0 = Web 2.0 + data portability + web service APIs

While the short-term business opportunity might be to go after the social publishing market, I strongly believe that the long-term business opportunity lies in the infinite interoperability and that spans well beyond the social software market.

Thanks to Open Source software and companies like Google, the cost of building Web 2.0 applications will approach zero. Contrary to what one might think, this actually creates a lot of business opportunities. Opportunities that are best monetized through web services. But for that to happen, ubiquitous and seamless interoperability is key.

And here's How Drupal Will Save The World! Start here if you're confused.

Installing Drupal 6 | drupal.org - a great video introduction from Lullabot!

Drupal 6 Released and Ready to Manage your Content | Raincity Studios these guys have a pretty good summary of what is really going on with D6 and the various stuff going on around Drupal. Nice site design too. In Drupal we Trust | Raincity Studios

Another weekend with Drupal 6 | CMS Report sez it's good!

Modules: HOW ARE THE MODULES DOING for 6.0?? Contributed modules status - version 6.x | groups.drupal.org. It's gonna take a while (mid-March prolly) for key things.

Coming soon: Drupal Modules | Review, Rate, And Search Every Drupal Module

OPENID: This is actually of pivotal importance, for it changes how we think of Internet Identity! Make life easier for users with OpenID for Drupal | greenhughes.com

Tell search engines about new content on your Drupal site | greenhughes.com

Various posts trumpeting the Intro of Drupal 6:

• Drupal 6 released. Drupalistas celebrate! | TrevorTwining.com
• Drupal 6, now more than ever | GarfieldTech
• Drupal 6 Release | Idiotprogrammer
• Shiny Drupal 6 | OpenSpring
• Drupal 6 released! | Wim Leers has a good dev overview
• Drupal 6.0 Released | urlgreyhot is one of the more famed webdev blogs

How to rock theme development: if you haven't seen this, you haven't seen teh Futur of Teh Theme Developments! Theme developer module for Drupal 6 - Screencast

Zen theme 5.x-1.0 released for Drupal 5 and also is functional but Beta in D6, available here. Zen! Zen is a 'blank theme' good for developing on top of. Here's the docs for Zen.

For specific uses: Overriding contact.module, no core hacking required! | TrevorTwining.com

How to Remove Drupal System.css And Other Default CSS Files | Blamcast

Drupal Performance Agency | Tag1 Consulting, Inc. has some very helpful PDFs.

API = All new coolness: Saving Drupal code from database nonsense, Schema API is crucial for Module development and also the Batch API which handles... batching!

The nitty gritty: Drupal Hosting | Theme Garden Theme Garden is interesting but may not be cool with D6?

There will be a good Drupal 6 webcomic system which will let you make individual character pages, storylines and other badass elements. not bad! Webcomic 6.x Battle Plan | groups.drupal.org and it has its own group: Webcomics | groups.drupal.org

Lullabot is pretty sweet. They make good podcasts. For example how CCK works at the database level.

Social networking nibbles: SWiK's got stuff about Drupal. Drupal on Del.icio.us. Drupal for NonProfits is teh interesting!

DrupalDojo is teh r0x0rz.

Removing The Default CSS In Drupal 5 this has been an issue for me at various times, so it's quite a helpful nugget of code! This guy is also putting together something VERY cool and VERY needed: Drupal Modules | Review, Rate, And Search Every Drupal Module

Random site: this D6 supporter is getting more columns via Zen theme: brianpuccio.net | from my point of view

DrupalSites.net is cool but not working right at the moment.

For bored developers looking for useful projects: DROP Drupal Really Open Participation, is a project designed for organizing short-term tasks. which was a spinoff of google-highly-open-participation-drupal - Google Code project.

the google project created the very interesting Safe filter gizmo, lets you users make their own input filters : Flexifilter for D6. comes with a 'wiki' filter as example.

Looks like the News.infoshop.org is rocking Drupal. See their bits on Net War and cyber war.

CSS imagemaps: insane! A List Apart: Articles: CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

Speed up your Drupal site: YSlow | Dries Buytaert. In the grand roster of 'really key things to read about Drupal' this particular article has achieved extreme fame! Apparently! Improving Drupal's page loading performance | Wim Leers

Tips on speeding up your Drupal sites | 2bits.com, Inc. - Drupal Development, Customization and Consulting

Yahoo shares their own more general tips: Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site

I thought that yelvington.com had some interesting bits, from a guy who appears to be an old school journalist & drupal 6 supporter.

beta testing

See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.
--Linus Torvalds- via Detroit Wireless Project

Ok I just saw the first few minutes of this one, but clearly it looks pretty damn cool. Steal This Film: hosted on GoogleVideo:

Steal This Film - Part 1 and the official website: Steal This Film II.

The background seems to change upon reload, conveying "JAWS" and "The Godfather" ... intellectual properties - or disk images. downloadables: Steal This Film II available in many languages!

Documenting the steadfast movement against intellectual property, Part 1 of Steal This Film takes account of the prominent players in the Swedish piracy (copyright infringement) culture: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån (Piracy Bureau), and The Pirate Party. This includes a critical analysis of the regulatory capture asserted by Hollywood film industry to leverage economic sanctions by the United States government on Sweden through the WTO to pressure Swedish police into conducting an illegal search and seizure for the purpose of disrupting a competitive distribution channel: The Pirate Bay tracker for P2P Internet filesharing with the BitTorrent protocol.

Also i found this very interesting: a blog noted of Second Skin - Feature-length Documentary about Virtual Worlds. Here's the official site: Second Skin - a Pure West Documentary. [And accurately enough, my remark is in the context of someone else noticing it. That's really meta people. And thus, fundamentally boring. {way to go}]

Meanwhile in the Establishment: Google To Be Innovation Provider For GOP Convention. That's here, people.

Nerds will like this: CMS Report's Front Page News | CMS Report
I thought that Mashable.com was exceedingly interesting! Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:BitTorrent Developers Pledge To Subvert Comcast Filters
Politics Online Conference 2008: Focus on Privacy
Social Networking: Risks vs. Rewards
and naturally this site is run by Drupal and will be on Drupal 6: Drupal Version Six Released
Which in turn led me to some new things: Searchles | Home - search plus circles. some kinds of social integration thingy.
Why teach journalism students Dreamweaver? | Martin Stabe I really recommend checking out how the interface of tools, internets and Journalism with a capital J fit together. It's a big deal.
Samsung's See'N'Search set-top TV / Internet box demo video - Engadget
Are Social Networks Responsible for Teen Suicides? | CenterNetworks
Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

check out teh Wired Journalists NING social network thingy!! NING lets you make your own social network sites.
Looking for teh opensource? don't forget good ol freshmeat.net: Welcome to freshmeat.net. I remember checking freshmeat all the damn time in high school senior year. a good 8 years ago and the site still looks EXACTLY the same. That's quality.
Schools going to Linux save tons of money: Techlearning > > Linux Makes the Grade > November 2007. And I'm sure everyone is really sad to be missing the Vista Experience.
Meanwhile is the Associated Press doomed? Down On The Wire - Forbes.comI saw the good old macalester activist wiki is still being used: Main Page - MPKB
When you need a global wireless network syndicate of networks, you need global.freifunk.net | syndicating the free wireless communities and blogs of the world and where is the news of Minnesota, people? (drupal powered, as is their blog: Freifunkblog | Freie Netzwerke, freies WLAN und freie (Funk-)Netze im deutschsprachigen Raum) and here's another German/English site about techs/Drupal/etc: perspektive 89 | Internationale Perspektive aus Berlin
Local lunatic: Slanderous Kook: I'm a Slander Victim - February 14, 2008
....And that's all for this random yet interesting enough post......

Hey all, if you're interested, check out deep6.hongpong.com for a new Drupal 6.0 test server, with lots of themes and some modules to doodle around with. Not bad!

I haven't set up good levels of permissions yet, but please send me an email and I will grant most anyone I know admin access on Deep6 for testing purposes.

However I have just filed my first official D6 bug report: Fatal error memory exhausted on Modules admin screen | drupal.org. No idea where that one is coming from.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

It did not occur to me that outer space could have a smell, but the Don Pettit of the International Space Station sez its "a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation". sweet. (via /.)

"It reminded me of my college summers where I labored for many hours with an arc welding torch repairing heavy equipment for a small logging outfit. It reminded me of pleasant sweet smelling welding fumes. That is the smell of space."

The original SimCity got open-sourced as 'Micropolis'! It's cool how old games get open-sourced (see the Marathon Infinity Aleph One project). And better yet, it got donated to the One Laptop Per Child Project. More @ /. As a true SimCity zealot, I have to say that handing it over to all those kids in the developing world is really quite cool!

UK News: you better shut off your fuckin wireless Internet router because if someone grabs a Sony BMG album, you're on the Big Shit List: Internet users could be banned over illegal downloads - Times Online

Drupal 6.0 released: its a big deal. One guru I know dropped what he was doing at his job and installed that right away on his test server. That's devotion, people. That's one hell of a platform.

The McCain version of the schmaltzy black-and-white Obama rock-n-roll celeb video. john.he.is. [satire, people]

Comcast is really getting tangled up by playing content police and jamming competing video services, the Washington Post noticed:

Marvin Ammori, the general counsel for Free Press, said Comcast's behavior is the second major example of an service provider overstepping its authority in an attempt to quash competition. In March 2005, the FCC fined Madison River Communications for blocking calls by competitor Vonage, which provided free calls over the Internet.

Ammori said that by interfering with video transfers, Comcast is trying to protect its television and On Demand video services.

Among the leading pranks of the corporate behemoth: Using pervasive data mining to jam BitTorrent yet claiming that they are somehow not responsible for the vast levels of piracy on their network. But also, that it's legit to jam legal BitTorrents even though the system is a 'killer app' that will eventually destroy their business model (arbitraging the distribution of content, getting a cut from the generators of the content for the privilege of vending it to the ever-fattening American Consumer). The FCC is getting up in their shit. Etc.

The uber-tech savvy audience at Slashdot points out that if Comcast wants to play traffic cop and stop the Torrents, they should not be legally shielded for creating the crime of transmitting the illegal Torrents in the first place. Thansal sez:

The argument here is this:

ISPs are currently not liable for what illegal things their customers do with the service provided.

One of the reasonings behind this is that they should not be mining traffic enough to know wth is going on. (IANAL, this is a bad explanation)

Comcast says that they SHOULD be mining traffic to shape it and see wth is going on.

Comcast should then be held liable for any illegal activities that they 'know' about because of this monitoring.

[IANAL = I Am Not A Lawyer, tho really that twisted tribe is the most anal.] A ton of smart arguments in here about it.

Also they have been bumping the rate for Internet-only connection to a whopping $65 a month, up from about $50. However, if you yell at them enough when they call to tell you about the bump, it is apparently possible to avoid getting charged. This is what I was told. Comcast is such a disaster.

See FreePress.net for more on the battles of Net Neutrality and Corporate Nonsense. And download Miro, an open source RSS-friendly video player which can also slurp the FLV files out of YouTube, and indeed lets you subscribe to HD-quality BitTorrent powered content 'channels'. This program, Miro, is indeed the Comcast Killer. Shit!

That's all........

Introducing OS X 10.5 Leopard: HOTNESS!

Ok fine, that is really VisiCalc for the Apple II, one of the first Killer Apps in computing history.

(Note: The nifty blogging tool Ecto 3 is now at beta 6. It is still a bit buggy but i am a registered user so i'm giving em feedback on the bugs, crashes etc.)

A correction: someone anonymous added a comment that Apple WebKit, the core engine of Safari, is NOT derived from Gecko, the engine that runs Mozilla Firefox and other Mozilla web renderings (Thunderbird, Camino and SeaMonkey among them). Evidently the WebKit was an in-house project or whatever.

Today I started looking a bit at the history of Apple's OS evolution. It's a pretty arcane area. Chances are, you haven't been sitting around lately wondering "What ever happened to HyperCard or Quickdraw GX? What is the connection between Cocoa and Yellow Box / Rhapsody? Where did the OS X Developer Kit come from?" etc.

The hairy backroads of Apple's circuitous development path since the 1970s are not really that interesting to most people, but with OS X 10.5 just released, it is a good time to review where the Apple Macintosh operating system came from, and thereby getting a more granular sense of its trajectory and future developments.

The big trend I noticed when reading up on the history was how Apple used to have a lot of shoddy in-house technologies that never quite worked smoothly. The core of OS X itself came from the NeXT Corporation, and it's interesting to see how NeXT developer tools (Interface Builder mainly) were ported to OS 9 before X came out, and those sorts of elements became deeply embedded into OS X today.

A kind of plugin structure has been evolving in OS X: Core Audio, Core Graphics and other packages inspired by Quicktime's design will allow app creators to easily make powerful and cool applications.

AppleInsider.com is a damn fine website. So without further ado, a collection of articles which both explore the original history of the Apple, as well as the brand-new features in iCal, Developer Tools, Core Video and other aspects of the new OS X 10.5. Some of these are on the Insider, some on other sites.

Introductory Mac OS X Leopard Review: Present & Future Value. The historic big picture, including the Apple II and BeOS.

Introductory Mac OS X Leopard Review: Core Graphics and the new UI. Nitty Gritty stuff, but also a review of what's happened since OS X 10.0.

RoughlyDrafted.com: Ten myths of Leopard #1 Graphics must be slow. Shorter: It's faster because various drawing bits have finally been set up to run through the graphics card (GPU) instead of the CPU, so you can get purty effects without the pokiness, unlike Windows Vista.

RoughlyDrafted.com: How Apple Keyboards lost a logo and Windows PCs gained one. The true story of where the Command symbol came from: Swedish campground maps!

A look at the old techs: Platform Crisis: the Lazy Dinosaur. Proprietary techs and long term legacy support caused Apple and Microsmish to become "Lazy dinosaurs" at various points. The graphic is awesome.

Adobe to update some CS3 level apps for OS X 10.5. However your CS2 apps may go haywire and were "not designed" for Leopard and therefore may cause problems that eschatonistically "Likely to encounter issues for which there is no resolution." Like the Bush Administration?

An introductory review of 10.5: iCal and Mail. 10.5 Address Book and iChat: looking nifty. Check this out: all the effects available to mutate the looks of images are actually "Quartz composer composition files" and you can make your own. They are available all over Leopard in iChat, Photo Booth and elsewhere, part of Core Graphics. The main ones are in /System/Library/Compositions, but add your own at /Library/Compositions and create new photo filters in the Quartz Composer in the latest Developer Tools (more below). Also Address Book now automatically digs up TIFF files matching email addresses from Library/Images/People , anywhere a person's email address is used.

Both of these are cool elements that basically allow any developers to tie in their apps to an open framework in the system, creating better and more well-integrated applications. Like embedding Quicktime or other common things, new OS X development features seem to have a solid, open orientation that permits applications to use customized services around the whole system. This is the big evolution in OS X operating system design under the hood, and Linux and Windows would be wise to understand what is going on here. Look at the next one:

Strongly recommended for geeks: An introductory Mac OS X Leopard Review: Developer Tools. Includes HyperCard and AppleScript. Bonus: the new Developer Tools include easily deployed versions of key UI parts of iTunes: the iTunes Store heirarchy breadcrumb thingy is included, as well as the iTunes "smart playlist" Rules Editor system.

OS X server will run on virtual machines legally. Ok, one key thing for modern web servers is to run numerous 'virtual' operating systems on one server box, which takes a ton of RAM and CPU, but ensures that if you get hacked or otherwise trashed, the one virtual operating system can get chucked like a soda can without fucking up the other virtual OSes. You run like five virtual Linux boxes on one real machine, and they're basically unstoppable because even the worst fuck-ups can be limited to just killing a single virtual machine. Also allows better development because you can make test 'sandboxes' to run self-contained whatever. Apple changed their license policy to allow this, and it's a good thing:

Many of these businesses need to separate programs from the main operating system in the event of a malware infection or a crash, or else need a sandbox to test new software without buying an entirely separate computer. This is already commonplace with Virtual PC, VMware, and similar tools on most operating systems, but until now has been impossible with Apple hardware. This will change in the next several months when SWSoft intends to release Parallels with its first instance of Mac OS X virtualization support, Rudolph says.

All righty, good stuff to check out if it's your kind of thing.

Thanks to pixeldusted for the post, it says more about the bureaucracy than I can even convey. Sweetness.

OS X is at 10.4.5 right now, but an intrepid hacker known as Maxxus has developed a hacked version of 10.4.4 that can be set up and operate on ordinary Intel-based PCs. I really wonder what Steve Jobs is really thinking right now. He must surely realize this is the most leet (1337) or stylish way to get people around the world interested in running OS X on PCs. Thus, he's prepped to fight Microsoft Windows on his own turf, and the first attack wave could be the hackers. This would be cool as hell.