Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Monday, November 17, 2003

Money-making Windows -- Comment()
Microsoft's money machine revealed: "The grand-daddy of them all was the unit responsible for Windows. It had costs of just $545 million but generated a profit of $2264 million, a staggering 415.4% profit on the money they put into it."

Christmas will be hot spam season -- Comment()
The number spam e-mail messages rises again. Fortunately, almost none get through, thanks to server-side filtering and the spam filter of Mail of Mac OS X. Two weeks ago I received about 70 spam messages in a week, today I have 184 spam messages in the spam folder (received within a week). I would guess that Christmas will be the busiest spam season ever.

How many source lines of code (SLOC) in Red Hat 9, Debian, Mac OS X 10.3, Windows Longhorn? -- Comment()
I'm thinking about the complexity of current state-of-the-art operating systems. However, I have been unable to find estimates for the current systems. Red Hat 7.1 was estimated to be at 30 million SLOC, and Windows XP at 40 million. What about Red Hat 9, Debian, Mac OS X 10.3, Windows Longhorn?

-- Comment()
Mail.app and AppleScript: "Last month, I posted a link to some free software for Mail.app OS X that Jonathan Nathan is offering under the GPL. This code was designed to allow a user of Mail.app to move a message to a folder with a single keystroke. [...] Apple has released Panther, and Aaron has released a script that does the same thing within Panther." [Lessig Blog]

The script by Aaron works even with hierarchical mail folders, provided they are written using the "folder/subfolder" notation. I made several scripts for moving messages to often-used folders, and tested them a bit. Nice!

Top 500 supercomputers: Apple G5 supercluster in third place -- Comment()
The TOP500 List for November 2003 is available. This list will be announced this week at the SC2003 conference at Phoenix, Arizona. The Apple G5 dual supercluster at Virginia Tech (see some background) is thus officially the third fastest supercomputer on Earth. The listed Rmax speed is 10.3 teraflop/s. And who is listed as the vendor? "Self-made." (The next self-made system is in position 63.)

Update: Here is the press release on the top-500 list.

Making equations on Mac OS X -- Comment()
Equation Service 1.0 generates mathematical equations for Keynote and other similar programs on Mac OS X. Thanks for Doug Rowland for writing the software. The package uses pdflatex for typesetting, so you need to have TeX installed. Here is a sample: