Posted on the January 16th, 2008 under Editorial by digg
Whether you like Macs or not, whether you like Apple or not, you have to admit, the iPod and iTouch are simply cool! I used to admire HP engineering but with the iPod, the iPhone, the iTouch and the MacBooks (especially the MacBook Air), i have to say the award for best hardware design goes to Apple.
And now, for the moment we’ve all been waiting for…well, the moment, i’ve been waiting for anyway…
Steve Jobs: “Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.”
Posted on the January 12th, 2008 under Editorial by digg
Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography and other books and articles on security and privacy, leaves his wireless network unprotected. My first reaction was probably the same as yours. What an idiot! He then goes on to make a few points that made me regret my first reaction. Bruce highlights the many other ways we take security for granted including leaving doors unlocked, drive in the rain while on a cellphone (whew!) and make other security sacrifices for the sake of convenience.
He explains that while it leaves your computers more vulnerable to leave your wifi open, you are exposed when you use your laptop in a public location anyway so you had better learn to secure your computer.
While I agree with nearly all of Bruce’s comments, I think i’ll keep my wifi secure. Oh yeah…i’m going to start locking the back door when I leave the house now as well!
Posted on the January 10th, 2008 under Editorial by digg
Less than a week after it came out Sony BMG was planning to sell music not loaded down with copyright, they’re officially selling DRM-free MP3s through Amazon’s MP3 store later this month, making it the first to carry DRM-free music from all four major labels.
Posted on the December 20th, 2007 under Editorial by digg
Firefox 3 Beta 2 has been officially released over at Mozilla.
[Improved in Beta 2!] Firefox 3 Beta 2 includes approximately 900 improvements over the previous beta, including fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements.
Posted on the December 20th, 2007 under Editorial by digg
According to a source familiar with the latest Leopard build seeded to developers, in addition to all those meaningless “little” fixes, our source tells us that Apple has fixed Stacks by adding the missing “list view” option that should have been there all along.
Posted on the July 13th, 2007 under Editorial by digg
The idea of squirting music is one of those ideas that seem obvious enough once you think about it and to tell you the truth, it sounds really cool. But…without having looked at the patent yet (I will and will post details here later…) it seems obvious that there has to be a DRM mechanism involved.
Microsoft, in case you missed it, DRM just isn’t working out all that well…maybe someone will get the hint and open source DRM.
Posted on the July 13th, 2007 under Editorial by digg
If you haven’t heard of Amazon’s S3 web service yet then you are missing out…this is a very cool service and with the addition of the new MySQL service could very well become the new infrastructure for small internet startups.
Posted on the July 7th, 2007 under Editorial by digg
Google’s study looked at more than one hundred thousand disk drives which were a combination of serial and parallel ATA consumer-grade hard disk drives, ranging in speed from 5400 to 7200 rpm, and in size from 80 to 400 GB. The observed range of annualized failure rates varied from 1.7 percent, for drives that were in their first year of operation, to over 8.6 percent, observed in their third year.
I have spent many sleepless waiting for a hard drive to fail simply because S.M.A.R.T. predicting impending failure. For several years I would have the following email message sent by cPanel.
Subject: [cPanel smartcheck] Possible Hard Drive Failure Soon
S.M.A.R.T Errors on /dev/hda
From Command: /usr/sbin/smartctl -q errorsonly -H -l selftest -l error /dev/hda
ATA Error Count: 1
Error 1 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 93 hours
—-END /dev/hda–
I eventually switched to another machine simply because I couldn’t take the stress but the hard drive never did fail.
Take a look at Google’s findings…if only I had known!
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