reviews of Mac OS 10.4

Ars Technica

This is an impressively in-depth look into the guts of Tiger and its predecessors. People who are interested in OS architecture should check this out.

MacInTouch

Less detailed, but it covers some things that the first article skimmed over or skipped.

(Disclosure: I haven't looked at Tiger myself, yet, but I'm picking my copy up later today, and have bought a 3-year upgrade subscription.)

isn't the Associated Press supposed to at least pretend to be neutral?

CNN.com: Creating 'human-animals' for research: Ethics report endorses mingling human cells with lesser beings

First, we'll paint someone as the Not-Necessarily-Evil-But-Certainly-Amoral Scientist:

The University of Nevada-Reno researcher talks matter-of-factly about his plans to euthanize one of the pregnant sheep in a nearby lab.

He can't wait to examine the effects of the human cells he had injected into the fetus' brain about two months ago.

"It's mice on a large scale," Chamberlain says with a shrug.

Then, we'll stir up some amorphous unease with some loaded adjectives:

But the biological co-mingling of animal and human is now evolving into even more exotic and unsettling mixes of species, evoking the Greek myth of the monstrous chimera, which was part lion, part goat and part serpent.

Particularly worrisome to some scientists are the nightmare scenarios that could arise from the mixing of brain cells: What if a human mind somehow got trapped inside a sheep's head?

It doesn't get better from here, really.

The other thing that particularly annoys me--apart from the almost complete lack of pretense to objectivity--is that there is a huge assumption being made here, without comment or discussion . . . and it is one that we have only ever confronted in fiction to this point, and worth discussing in its own right. (Anyone?)