A few days ago I installed the new iLife 09. There are some new features in some of the apps included. GarageBand now has piano and guitar lessons. These were rather difficult to download. The download was often aborted, but installation sometimes resumed after this, sometimes the download started all over. Nevertheless, the lessons are great.
Now for iWeb I am less positive. iWeb 09 is bugged. People are experiencing trouble with the new ftp upload. There are problems with fonts too. Japanese fonts become unreadable for the simple reason that iWeb now sets the font-weight to 700 instead of normal as it should be and as you see on your Mac. The rendering of colours has changed too. The result is that what you see on your computer is not what you get on the internet. Have a look at the problems I experienced with iWeb 09.
Then there is the new Faces and Places feature in iPhoto. This kind of thing is nice for people who just bought a new Mac and don't take more than a few hundred pictures a year. People who already have thousands of photos in iPhoto are not going to provide all of them with the names of faces and places. The faces thing can't even be disabled. The only thing you can do is not enter any names to the faces. It seems to me to be an ideal tool for police and CIA. As I am not a police officer, I can do without faces.
If you want my advice, if you already have several iWeb sites with blogs and photo galleries, don't upgrade or do a custom install and choose only the apps you definitely want. Otherwise you can get into trouble. The Apple developers seem to develop for new customers and they don't seem to bother much about their old customers. Why did they change the colour management and has the font treatment deteriorated? I do hope they come with a fix soon. Lots of people are busy reinstalling iWeb 08 now.
Where previously you could publish both to MobileMe and a local folder, now this has become troublesome. So actually iWeb 09 is a step back.
11:59:10 AM
CorporateWatch: "Back in 2005, over 100 Palestinian organisations and unions called for a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel 'until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights' (see the call here). The boycott campaign had been gathering momentum all over the world, with dedicated campaigns and groups researching, lobbying their governments and the public, and taking direct action. Following the recent massacres in Gaza, the calls for boycotting Israeli goods have become even more powerful and mainstream, as people started to realise that Israeli and international companies investing in Israel not only contribute to an immoral and often illegal economy, but also help perpetuate a brutal and bloody occupation.
Since the 1967 military occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights, Israel has built more than 135 settlements in these occupied territories and encouraged Israeli settlers and industries to move into them, often by confiscating Palestinian land and destroying the Palestinian residents' lives. The case against companies involved in constructing and/or sustaining these illegal settlements, profiting from the use of stolen Palestinian land and exploiting the captive labour force for their production, could not be stronger.
Raising questions about labelling and sourcing Israeli products at supermarkets has become a feature of boycott campaigns as there is strong evidence that goods produced on illegal settlements in the West Bank are being mislabelled to deceive concerned customers (see here and here). A barcode starting with the numbers 729 generally indicates that the product has been produced in Israel. However, products from illegal settlements may simply be labelled 'West Bank'."
PalestineChronicle: "A National Court of Spain judge on Thursday, January 29, named an Israeli minister and six high-ranking army commanders as suspects of committing crimes against humanity in the Gaza Stripe in 2002.
Israel is already preparing for a wave of lawsuits against crimes committed during its 22-day onslaught against Gaza, which killed more than 1,330 people, half of them women and children."
10:56:09 AM
Dennis Kucinich wants the Federal Reserve under government control.
Wikipedia: "A central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is the entity responsible for the monetary policy of a country or of a group of member states. It is a bank that can lend to other banks in times of need. Its primary responsibility is to maintain the stability of the national currency and money supply, but more active duties include controlling subsidized-loan interest rates, and acting as a lender of last resort to the banking sector during times of financial crisis (private banks often being integral to the national financial system). It may also have supervisory powers, to ensure that banks and other financial institutions do not behave recklessly or fraudulently.
Most richer countries today have an 'independent' central bank, that is, one which operates under rules designed to prevent political interference. Examples include the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Federal Reserve System in the United States. Some central banks are publicly owned, and others are privately owned. For example, the Reserve Bank of India is publicly owned and directly governed by the Indian government. The major difference is that government owned central banks do not charge the taxpayers interest on the national currency, whereas privately owned central banks do charge interest."
The Dutch National Bank did not warn the Dutch savers of the risk involved with the Icelandic Icesave bank. They allowed Icesave to operate freely in the Netherlands.
Now that many banks are on the brink of failure, our governments are pumping money into them. It is only natural then for the government to take complete control of the whole banking system. All banks should be nationalized and remain under government control. Central and reserve banks should be the first to be returned to government control.
When governments support banks, that means we, the taxpayers, support those banks. When they make profits these should go to national welfare.
10:47:58 AM
