NERDS! 

New macbook air announced -Wired

It looks like our sources were right, Apple has just announced the MacBook Air, "The World's Thinnest Notebook".

The MacBook Air sports a full sized, 13.3 inch LED backlit screen with a built in iSight camera and a full sized, backlit keyboard. The whole thing is just 0.16 inches thick. So thin, in fact, that you can slide it into an envelope.

The new notebook also has a multi touch trackpad, and it's big. The multi touch functions can be customized, but the essentials are there too: the pinch'n'zoom of the iPhone, for instance. Apple have gone with a tiny, iPod sized 1.8 inch hard drive to save space, which will be 80GB in size, but – get this – there's an option for a 64GB SSD!

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Needless to say, I would defer to the man who invented the internet on these issues if he threw his hat in the ring instead of wasting his time trying to save our doomed, yet pleasantly unseasonably warm planet.

News.com 2008 Technology Voters' Guide | CNET News.com

Editors' note: Some candidates chose not to respond, despite repeated queries from CNET News.com: Republicans Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson, and Democrats Joe Biden and Bill Richardson.

Sen. Hillary Clinton: "No other communications medium in recent history has had such a profound impact as the Internet on free expression, education, the proliferation of commerce, and the exchange of political ideas. And it is the basic principles of neutrality and nondiscrimination that have allowed the Internet to flourish."

Sen. Chris Dodd: "It is time that we approach the Internet the same way we approach water, electricity, and highways--as critical infrastructure our citizens require to participate fully in American society...As president, I would use revenue gained from the spectrum auction to expand the development of new technology and ensure affordable high-speed wireless Internet access nationwide."

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Nothing like this latest security hole explains why open-source software and Firefox are far superior to the massive companies like Microsoft. I'm not going to spend long explaining the details, but Microsoft is slow to react to this risk and it has now been exploited across thousands of websites. Hackers were able to sucessfully redirect all IE users for all websites hosted by one hosting company and spread the virus even farther. While, Firefox's security team and developers react immediately and can offer a fix within hours of a discovered security hole, Microsoft can take weeks, months, or longer. The IE risk is so great that third-party developers are offering patches, but of course IE is rejecting anything that doesn't come from in-house and advising their users to do the same.

Firefox Good. Internet Explorer Bad.

This is all standard for IE. Web developers are constantly dealing with IE's refusal to keep up and observe internationally recongnized browser standards. Microsoft does this in order to keep a monopoly on web browsing. Ask an designer or developer and they can tell you the woes of having to redesign everything to work properly in IE. The W3C (World-Wide Web Consortium) sets standards for how code that developers create is supposed to be read by a browser. Your browser is just a tool for reading that code. Yet without fail, IE ignores certain portions of the rules with every release. In so doing, they force all developers to develop with slightly different standards. Most have become adept at programming for both, but Microsoft banks on forcing developers to optimize sites for IE and, thus make it the best way to browse the web. So after this weekend's (and more to come I'm sure) attacks, how's that working out for you Microsoft? Not to good....

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What do you get when mix the lunacy of Ted Steven's explaining what the internet is and the brilliant site Your the Man Now Dog?


Click the pic for the full effect.

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For the past few months I’ve been raising the issue of Microsoft Word integration with developers of my favorite CMS (content management system) Drupal. There were several reasons why this wasn’t happening, or likely to happen soon. A major one is that most developers view Microsoft as the Evil Empire (Google is king with their “don’t be evil” motto), and can’t imagine why anyone would use the vendor locked resources provided by Microsoft, when much better alternatives were available from open source (free) providers. In short, the kind of person that possesses the skills to create such integration between a website and Word is not the kind of person who would use Word in the first place.

My argument is that despite developer’s desire for users to post content through the web interface or through great third-party applications made for web-posting, people will stick to what they know. I can confirm this through experience. I’ve offered several great options to clients including powerful WYSIWYGs and posting by email. Yet, I still end up with users wanting to simply upload a PDF, or cut and paste from Word. This led me to the conclusion that the system that could offer Word integration, even of a very simple nature, would be the one that would move from the development world’s flavor of the month, to the business world’s must have web system. Well, the wait is over, and hopefully the days of running a code clean up script to rid posts of offending Microsoft Word tags are as well.

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I get the move to greater digital security, but nowhere in this article is there mention of the fact that RFID chips in all passports could theoretically mean tracking US citizens anywhere in the world, or at least tracking their passport.  The article does talk about the fact that others could "eavesdrop" and collect passport information remotely.  Scary on so many levels.

US issues biometric passports despite concerns

The passport chips contain all the personal information printed inside the passport, as well as a digitised photograph of the passport holder. At ports of entry, scanners will access these data and compare them with a national database for identity verification.

The new "E-Passports" have so far been issued only to US diplomats, as part of a pilot programme conducted in collaboration with Singapore, New Zealand and Australia. They will be introduced nationwide by October.

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With lasts weeks news aboug "Google's Calendar":http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/08/exclusive-screenshots-google-calendar/ program, "Google's Gdrive":http://blogs.zdnet.com/Google/?p=121 that will let you store all your computer files online, and even launching Google News (is it really still bet?) "launching in Israel":http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-news-israel.html and opening an office there, Google is poised to take over the world.

They have amassed a staggering amount of information and rely on complete public trust. Without the public's trust, nobody would be using their products and sharing their information. Consider gmail (which I love). Gmail scans your email in order to place relevant ads alongside the reading window. There are not too many companies that most of us would allow to read our email, even if it is just a computer program. As Google grows by leaps, they risk becoming a behemoth like Microsoft and alienating their core user base--a unique combo between geek, yuppie, hippie, and conservative (put that in an acronym).

Google's goal of amassing information and making it accessible is noble, but has relied on us trusting that this company is the "right hands" to have such power. What if it falls in the wrong hands...or, more likely will Google transform into the "wrong hands" as they continue to grow? Is information like money; does it always corrupt?

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