After reading a thread on Slashdot about an old video easter egg someone recovered from the System 7.1 (Mac OS, in modern parlance) installation CD, I ran into this page. It provides downloadable audio files for most old-school Mac hardware crash and system startup sounds.

I didn’t hear most of the “sad Mac” sounds very often, as most Macs in the System 7 era were pretty reliable - things didn’t start really going downhill until the Performa/PowerBook 5300/etc. era of the mid-1990’s - but this is still pretty cool.

My favorite: the start-up sound associated with the Quadra series (I believe this may have also been used in my LCIII). Start-up sounds took a general dive in quality until the PCI-based PowerMacs came on the scene.

Probably one of the best places to see all of Apple’s old hardware is on apple-history.com, where specs and such for pretty much every piece of Apple hardware are provided. Everything from the Apple I to the Mac mini are represented.

Another cool site is folklore.org, which contains essays and anecdotes from all sorts of people who were involved in the creation of the Mac platform (people like Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Steve Capps, Bruce Horn, etc). An good read if you’re interested in the (very much unofficial and unfiltered) history of one of the most influential tech companies out there.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Senator who wants to censor cable and satellite TV/radio. Unless these are just the words of a confused old fool - which seems distinctly possible - he now wants to extend the moralistic grasp of the FCC onto the Internet as well:

We ought to find some way to say, here is a block of channels, whether it’s delivered by broadband, by VoIP, by whatever it is, to a home, that is clear of the stuff you don’t want your children to see.

Broadband? VoIP? Apparently, Senator Stevens wants to tell you what you can send over your cable modem or DSL connection. In fact, he’s even gone so far as to suggest that VoIP - Voice over IP (for the uninitiated, this is voice communication sent via the Internet, sort of like a high-tech phone line) - should be censored too. As Jeff Jarvis quips, this could be the end of Internet phone sex!

Seriously, there is something severely broken in this country. We’re now in the year 2005 - why, when confronted by mere words and pictures of naked people, do we revert back to Puritanism? Don’t we have more important things to concern ourselves with?

Thar she blows!

In a blatant disregard for the concepts of personal responsibility, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska has proposed that current FCC decency standards for broadcast content should apply to both cable and satellite TV/radio - even in cases where the content is part of a subscription-based service, such as HBO, Sirius, or XM Radio.

Such changes could be proposed as part of a pending bill that would raise fines for decency violations imposed on broadcasters from $32,000 to $500,000 per incident.

In response to critics who state that such a change would grossly violate the First Amendment and that the FCC’s power does not extend to private, subscription-based services (as they do not utilize the limited/shared/public airwaves), Stevens has said that “If that’s the issue they want to take on, we’ll take it on and let the Supreme Court decide.”

I hope they do. This is such a clear and gross overstep of the Federal government’s role that it couldn’t possibly withstand judicial scrutiny, and I have to wonder why Ted Stevens even bothered to bring it up - unless the Senator is simply trying to score political points with holier-than-thou constituents back home.

I can (to a very limited extent) understand certain restrictions on limited, public frequencies - but there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for government to assert itself on what is fundamentally a private matter for adults to decide for themselves, and parents to decide for their children - particularly when you specifically have to opt into receiving this content in the first place.

Simply put, government does not have a constitutional right to dictate what is and is not considered moral in our society - and those who insist that it do so would do well to police their own households rather than impose themselves in mine. If someone thinks their kids are so fragile that seeing naked breasts (gasp! the horror!) or hearing a dirty word or two is going to irreparably harm their psyche, they should take censor-duty upon themselves and stop asking big brother to do it for them.