No 12" Mac Book. Ever.

Well if you watched the Macworld Keynote you know that there will be no 12" MacBook. Why? Because Steve Jobs said so. When he was leading into his intro of the "Air" he stated that other manufacturers compromise their sub-notebooks by giving them 11" and 12" screens. So Mr. Jobs thinks that the 12" form factor is a bad thing and would "compromise" the MacBook. Regardless to the fact that many people who have 12" Powerbooks have them because we WANT the "compromised" space and many of us have in fact gone from larger PowerBooks to the 12", Steve doesn't like it and what Steve doesn't like doesn't get made.

Steve also knows that all of us holdouts will eventually have to fold as batteries die, and new "gotta have" apps come out as Intel Only apps and of course we get tired of the 1.5 Ghz processor that the last iteration had.

Yes, the 12" Powerbok is dead and the prospects of a new 12" model has just been buried. Enjoy yours while it works.

Time Capsule

So is there some hidden "feature" in Time Machine to recognize a Time Capsule, are we to expect an OS update to enable this on other Macs, or will this work with any AFP network drive with a supposed update? Or maybe there's some key combination I need to use with Leopard (or a file to hack).

MacBook Air..

Gives the Kiss of Death to FireWire. The first Mac model I know of, since the clamshell iBooks and original iMac to not have a FireWire port. Though come to think of it I rarely use it on my 12 incher and then only for a webcam.

Proposed NJ Turnpike Tolls

On my other blog I complained about how much it cost me to drive to Miami (or was that Baltimore?). Anyway the crux of my complaint was the ridiculous numbers of tolls that one has to pay between NJ and Washington DC. For the privilege of traveling over a bridge in Delaware one pays a toll. I mean a toll to go all of maybe 5 miles. Then another and another and another. In the space of say 50 miles, one can pay at least 3 tolls. Why? Road, like speeding tickets are all about revenue. just as speeding tickets are about fattening county coffers so are toll roads. they go to pay for things unrelated to roads. I would prefer to pay a federal 'road tax" and a state "road tax" once and be done with all tolls from border to border. Tolls add to and cause traffic. When I made that trip last summer, whenever I came to a congested area I bet myself that there was a toll coming up. 90% of the time I was right. Cars emit more pollution when they are crawling and gas mileage suffers, unless you're in a hybrid or electric car So not only do tolls cause traffic problems, it also contributes to pollution. But what is worse is that one ought to be able to drive from one end of the country to the other without:

a) being surveilled (EasyPass)
b) being pick pocketed (tolled).

Now I understand how states may want to charge commercial entities for using the roads to make money. Fine. Federal Road tax and State road tax on businesses that make travel exemptions or who are in the business of deliveries. In fact I think if New Jersey, and the rest of the states, were to stop giving out Corporate welfare cheques (called tax breaks and tax incentives) there'd be all kinds of money in the state coffers.

Another Reason to not use Bluetooth headsets

"All that is necessary is knowing the device address, which can be easily sniffed, and the secret pin, which defaults to 0000. The headset audio is tapped while not in a call, so any room conversation the headset's mic can pick up can potentially be listened to remotely."


http://www.hackinthebox.org/url.php?url=25340

Listen to this guy

I saw this on Alternet. Don't laugh. Take this very seriously. VERY SERIOUSLY:

I've read books by evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters) that say the same thing - women want to marry men with power and money. I've seen it many times. But there's another side to that equation. Women want rich men, but many of them are willing to cheat on these rich men with poor but handsome men.

I'm 6', 195 lbs at 10% body fat, green eyes, a full head of frankly luxurious wavy hair, and I'm 99% percentile (over 8") in the other height measurement. I'm from a working-class family, and for a while, I pursued a career that was aimed at helping my fellow human beings more than it was aimed at making good money. I had plenty of women who wanted to have sex with me, no strings attached, and a few who actually cheated on their shorter, fatter, dumber, glasses-wearing boyfriends. One was worried she got pregnant and plotted to pass the spawn off as her boyfriend's. This was because these short, fat, stupid men were from richer families that were able to put them through schools with no student loans, set them up with cars and houses right out of graduation, and in some cases, even gave them high-paying jobs.

After a few years, I got wise to the way things work, and I got out of social work and got a job in IT, tripling my income instantly. I was at my IT job for one week before I met my wife. If I was still working in social work, I'm certain that I'd never have attracted my wife, except perhaps for quick rebound sex from one of her previous relationships.

The lesson is this: women want men with money and good family connections as husbands. Many, however, are willing to take handsome, genetically-gifted men who don't have as much money for lovers.

If you're some 5'8," pot-bellied, balding creep who had the good fortune of being born to a dad who's a senior law partner or a banker, you've probably got a pretty hot chick because of your Lexus and big house. But I'd keep a close eye on your hot wife or girlfriend. I never knowingly cheated with anyone, but I've unwittingly cuckolded a good number of you guys because your girls want some hot sex with a tall athletic stud while their fat, ugly rich husbands are toiling away at the office. This is no joke. Be warned. Some of you might already be raising the babies of guys like me without even knowing it.

The Strange Case of Child Pornography

And so this morning I read about a case in which a man, whose last name is the improbable Sodomski, was busted for having child pornography on his computer. Normally I have no sympathy for such people and I have even reported an online peddler of such material to the authorities when he attempted to send some my way. Homey don't play dat.

However; this case caught my attention because of the underlying privacy concern that it brought up. If you read about most child porn stings you will find that they usually involve a lengthy investigation in which people are caught using some kind of darknet in order to trade in such material. In some cases it involves snail mail. In other words the users involved have thoroughly shown that they have in fact either created, traded in, and purposefully owned child pornography. This is important. Going back to my statement on reporting an online peddler, In that case I was, in fact in possession of child pornography. I didn't ask for it, but it arrived. Knowing how the internet works, there was no doubt that there was a record of that transfer on someone's log and for a times there was a copy on my hard drive. Since I had not done a low level format or a "secure erase". The file, though "deleted" was still in fact on my drive for as long as it took for the OS to decide to write something else to that space. This time depends on the level of usage of the computer. This is somewhat important as we look at the case.

The man involved here brought his computer to Circuit City in order to have a DVD drive installed in his computer. At some point during this "install" the "tech" person did a search of the Hard drive and found "stuff that looked like adult material". the "tech" decided to click on the file to see what it was and discovered the child porn at issue. A judge ruled that the man's privacy was not infringed because he could not expect that the contents of his HD would not be looked at while the computer was out of his possession. I work with computers for a living so I know the process and this ruling is pretty bad.

Firstly, I'm not clear as to what Circuit City's policy towards their customers private data but I would be extremely disturbed, to the point of not using their "service" if they did not have a policy of "do not touch and do not look at" customer data. Furthermore I would be equally shocked if, unlike any other corporation I know about, Circuit City does not have a "no viewing of adult content" policy in effect as well. Let's assume for a minute that Circuit City does not have such policies on the books. Does this mean that Circuit City Techs are free to peruse user data which would inevitably include personal information of all kinds? Do they understand the inherent security risk this entails? If a customer has their identity stolen after having service at Circuit City, Circuit City could find itself at the receiving end of a lawsuit for knowingly allowing third parties to access user data. It's called willful negligence. That's not good.

But moving on from there. The process of installing and testing a DVD burner does not include a windows search. The only software portion of the install is the driver for the DVD drive (if needed, some drives already have the drivers in the host OS). After installing said software the machine would be rebooted and a test burn of a DVD would be performed. The tech ought to have a file they can test on a USB drive. In other words there is no good reason to do a search of the users system. So the question here is why were the techs performing this search? And why were they interested in the porn on the system? That's like having your car in for new tires and since the shop has a sign that the shop is not responsible for items left in the vehicle, the mechanics go through your glove box, digs in your seats for change or makes a few phone calls on your built in phone. After all, you left the car in their possession so you couldn't actually expect that they would limit their use of your vehicle to only that which is required to perform the service requested.

That is what bothers me about the ruling. Does Circuit City inform their customers that their data will be accessed? Does Circuit City inform their customers that their data will NOT be accessed? If either of these are the case then Circuit City would be in breech of a legal contract and a) ought to be sued. and b) the evidence ought not be admitted. I don't like option "b" but because I prefer that the law fail on the side of the citizen rather than the state I have to offer that option up.