Back to History

Good little debate on Slashdot on the ubiquitous browser Back button. One poster remarks, Back is "almost the only software feature in existence that is universally understood". But does it really do what you want? "Back" really functions as taking the user "up" the directory tree, whereas people perhaps expect it to be "previous".
(From Slashdot)

Moral compass of the internet

Wired bio of Sergey Brin, founder of Google and its head policymaker. Brin tackles issues such as the Church of Scientology's position on criticism, China's recent Google lock-out, racist or inflammatory websites, and companies' attempts to optimise their ranking. In steering the wired world's zeitgeist he could be regarded as one of the most powerful non-governmental influences on world culture and politics. Interesting to hear that his favoured value term is "useful".
(From Wired)

Apple drop X-only January plan

Apple have abandoned their plan to sell only Macs that boot in OS X from January. Report has the usual Quark waffle.
(From CNET News.Com)

IBM chip suits Apple

IBM have confirmed that their new 64-bit PowerPC 970 chip is AltiVec-compatible, which, I'm told, is good news for those who reckon Apple will start using it.
(From MacNN)

Service providers: 1 in 10 jobs now from InDesign

A pretty extensive voxpop survey by Jim Dalrymple on what people think of the QuarkXPress/AdobeInDesign battle. Adobe has made significant gains since InDesign 2.0 (up 188% year on year), and service providers say the number of jobs they receive from InDesign files has gone from 1 in 100 to 1 in 10. But he reckons this success will slow considerably when XPress for OS X finally ships. Quark's Glen Turpin is still sticking to the "we're going to make it solid, not sexy" line. What would be really interesting would be to see how fast XPress will be.
(From MacCentral)