Monty Python's Spamalot-Review

Two of the show's three well known actors--Tim Curry, David Hyde-Pierce, and Hank Azaria--were gone, with Curry temporarily (and unexpectedly) replaced by his very able understudy John Bolton* and Azaria off filming for some other obligation. There was quite a bit of grumbling by those who had paid inflated prices for the show well in advance only to find Curry, who had the lead role of King Arthur, missing. As good as Curry has been in everything in which I've seen him, though, it would have been hard for him to top Bolton's performance.

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Yamaha adds rare animal menagerie to papercraft offerings

Yamaha has increased its downloadable papercraft offerings to include dozens of "rare animals of the world" and "rare animals of Japan" as well as "the seasons" and the traditional highly detailed paper motorcycle models.
The downloads are availabe as pdf files

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Windows Vista Beta 1-Part2

Windows Vista's new look-and-feel is known as "Aero." On suitably equipped machines, Aero will exploit 3D graphics accelerators to implement "Glass" display effects. At this point, at least, the venerable shell metaphor of a desktop with overlapping windows hasn't changed, but Aero Glass uses subtle visual cues to make the experience much more convincing and seamlesswe'd dare say even a bit Mac-like. Window and dialog borders are partially transparent, blurring content behind them and casting drop shadows to enhance the sense of depth. They appear and disappear using understated zooming and fading effects. Buttons and controls have a gel-like look and light up in natural-looking ways.

Because the "chrome" that surrounds windows and dialog boxes is drawn by the OS rather than by individual applications, and because the bulk of apps written in recent years use common controls within their windows, many of the Glass effects appear even when you are running legacy applications. Programs written to take advantage of Windows XP's visual styles will automatically use Aero styles. Application developers taking advantage of the new Avalon APIs (application programming interfaces, described further below) will be able to exploit Glass effects in additional ways.
The familiar Start menu is still there too, although its organization has changed a bit. Responding to complaints that the cascading menus spawned by the "All Programs" option were difficult to navigate, Microsoft has changed the All Programs list so it appears embedded within the left pane of the Start menu. Now you can collapse and expand it, much as you can do with the tree view of directories in Windows Explorer.

Additionally, the Start menu contains an embedded search box that lets you search program names incrementallythat is, as you type each letter, the list of programs displayed is immediately constrained to those that match your search string. Different users will find it more or less useful to search for applications by name, but we expect that Microsoft's goal of making search pervasive will lead to this query box becoming an entry point for systemwide search. It's only natural for such a feature to be located in either the Start menu or on the taskbar.
Running Aero Glass will require moderately beefy hardware, including a 3D graphics accelerator that supports DirectX 9 with AGP 8X or PCI Express 8X support and at least 64MB of RAM. Although that may exceed the capabilities of today's typical corporate desktop, it shouldn't be a stretch for desktop systems and for the higher-end laptops that will be shipping when Vista arrives. Hardware that isn't up to snuff will be unable to show Glass effects like transparency or live icons, but even without them Vista will have the same basic look and feel. A third appearance, Classic, will be available for companies that don't want to have to train staff on a new interface.

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Windows Vista Beta 1-Part1

This version, aimed at developers and IT shops, lacks many features that the final Windows Vista, still over a year away, will have. But it has all the basic foundations of the OS and displays Microsoft's new emphasis on making a system that will be more stable and secure, as well as giving users greater clarity as regards their files. This "clear vision" is what Microsoft says is reflected in the Vista name.

These goals are evident in Beta 1. The device driver model has been reengineered for increased simplicity and security, so hardware that takes advantage of it should be more stable. (You'll still be able to run XP devices for compatibility, though).
Privilegesor which programs, services, and users get to do whathave been rethought. You'll see a big push toward User Account Protection, meaning that users normally won't run with Administrator privilegesor need to. In fact, administrators will also run with limited privileges most of the time. In addition, Microsoft promises, Internet Explorer 7 in Vista will run in an even more locked-down state, although that feature of IE isn't in Beta 1. All these things mean that spyware will no longer find such easy entry.
The overall goal here is an environment that offers better security and has fewer reboots, crashes, and hangs. It's too early to know how successful these initiatives will beno OS is completely securebut they clearly show an evolution in priorities from Windows XP.

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