Dan Moren, Macworld:
The white polycarbonate MacBook, first introduced in October of last year, now gains a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, up from the 2.26GHz chip it debuted with. In addition, it now sports an Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics chip—the same available in the latest 13-inch MacBook Pro—instead of the previous Nvidia GeForce 9400M, and Apple is boasting that the MacBook’s battery life now stretches to ten hours, up from seven.
ReclaimPrivacy.org:
This website provides an independent and open tool for scanning your Facebook privacy settings. The source code and its development will always remain open and transparent.
Dead simple and awesome. Works like a charm.
I have lived my life obsessed with finding the right bag. Before I purchased Booq’s Tiapan Shadow I had four different messenger style bags that I used off and on, depending on my mood. I decided that if I was to buy a new bag, then I must sell all of the old bags, leaving me with just one bag. This meant careful research into what I want and need in a bag, one bag.
The search inevitably lead me back to my favorite bag manufacturer (Booq) where I purchased the Tiapan Shadow M. Before I get to the actual review of the bag, I want to share what my criteria were for a new bag.
I used these four criterion to judge each bag that I looked at, and I looked at a lot.
When the Tiapan arrived at my place I had already sold two of my bags, and the last two were waiting to be shipped out. I dove right in and looked through all the areas figuring out where stuff would fit. In the end I found a spot for everything that I really need and got rid of all the excess. From this stand point the bag is a success.
I head to work and quickly realize that my water bottle does not fit in this bag, I had never considered this. Luckily I drive, and it is not that hard to carry the water bottle in my hands. By the time I get home I am amazed by just how much smaller this bag is than the ones I was using.
Since getting the iPad I have found that my laptop rarely leaves my office during the day (whereas before if I knew I would be gone for more than an hour it came with). Because I was leaving my laptop I found that I rarely took the old bags with me, they simply seemed like over kill. Now with the small size of the Tiapan, I find that I prefer tossing the iPad into it instead of hand carrying it.
I love the design of this bag, the smoothness of not having a handle on top, combined with the fact that there is a hidden hand hold sewn in really makes me smile. The oversized shoulder pad is excellent as is the seatbelt nylon strap. But the real gem of this bag is the blush interior of the laptop compartment, complimented by some of the best padding I have seen in a bag to date. The iPad fits in the bag perfectly, as does everything else I need.
Overall this bag is excellent, especially considering the price tag of $129 (at this writing). I have always been a huge fan of of the bags that Booq makes and the Tiapan is no exception. The Macbook Pro compartment fits my Macbook Pro better than any bag I have seen, it is very snug, yet very easy to take the computer in an out. The bag is small, so if you feel the need to carry a lot with you, then this bag is not for you.
I look forward to traveling with this bag, it won’t take up a lot of room under the seat in front of me. Which is of crucial importance when you are 6’3”.
One British bank is making the switch away from the Blackberries, interesting that a Bank is doing it. What will be more interesting is whether companies start to follow suit – my guess would be that there is mounting pressure form employees. Not to mention the usefulness of having a corporate iPhone app to pull all the data a remote worker would need.
Ernest for Torrent Freak:
The Pirate Bay is suffering some temporary downtime as their bandwidth provider has stopped passing through traffic. A week ago, Hollywood got an injunction to effectively shut down the Pirate Bay by threatening its provider with huge fines. The Pirate Bay team is currently working on a solution.
As of this writing the site was still down for me.
Ingenious idea from the Citrix CIO as reported by Charles Babcock:
After 18 months, 1,400 employees have taken him up on the offer. In many cases, he says, they buy a computer that costs $3,000 or more, using the company’s reimbursement to upgrade themselves to a higher level multimedia and game-playing machine than they would normally purchase. Each subsidized purchase must include a three-year warranty on the computer.
and
Why implement a bring-your-own-computer to work policy at a company? Martine says employees are already bringing their favorite devices to work, their Blackberries and iPhones or other smart phones, their tablets and their netbooks. IT can assign one type of computer to everyone, but he found end users really want to pick out their own. When they do, they also tend to develop the ability to self-maintain them.
So now they are reducing their IT costs, increasing employee satisfaction and ensuring these computers last longer than normal. All that and this:
In addition, if he loses the laptop at the airport, all the data he’s created with virtualized applications, whether connected or disconnected, has been stored in an encrypted “safe zone” folder. Without the encryption key, the folder is useless to the possessor of the laptop — no corporate data has been lost, Martine said.
Citrix engineering now has “1,500 people testing its products, 1,500 people they’d never find in a lab. It will put out a higher quality product that will last for years because of that,” he added.
Why every company is not doing this is beyond me, makes great financial, HR, and R&D sense.
Almost didn’t post this as there really is nothing new but then Rob Pegoraro said something I thought I had to post:
Meanwhile, from what I can tell the leadership at Facebook sincerely believes that the company can and should become the Web’s dominant source of identity and authentication, providing a feature left out of the Internet’s original design. But they don’t seem to accept the thought that becoming such a social utility might require changes in their behavior.
As many would say +1 to that.
Larry Ellison is a great Silicon Valley character, and this line from Ashlee Vance is probably very accurate:
As I understand it, Mr. Ellison was displeased with just about everything.
[Talking about the Sun acquisition]
Raphael Minder shows what is wrong with the entertainment industry:
“The triumph of downloading in Spain is partly because people can watch the latest episode of their favorite American series with Spanish subtitles weeks before it gets dubbed and released on television here,” said Javier de la Rosa, a former radio presenter who is now a journalism professor at Francisco de Vitoria University here. “The quality and speed is also excellent nowadays, and some Web sites like Series Yonkis even help people by ranking downloads according to quality, so that’s very user friendly.”
The people who are trying to sell the movies and music are a lot less enthusiastic. Sony Pictures Entertainment warned in March that it was considering halting altogether the sale of its DVDs in Spain.
This about sums up the real problem:
Mr. Domingo sees the fight against downloading as “just an excuse for companies to try to stick to a business model that no longer makes sense and is way behind the technology.”
Two great methods detailed, though clearly I recommend the last method of using Dropbox.
For a short while I used the WordPress 3.0 beta on this site, when I switched serves and hosts I went back to WordPress 2.9.x. For no other reason than to ensure stability, though I never encountered any errors with the beta. 3.0 is a welcomed update and here is hoping the final comes out soon.
Brad Stone:
Google executives said in January that the site, which has perennially lost money, had increased its revenue, and that ad space on YouTube’s home pages for 20 countries was sold out every day toward the end of 2009. Many analysts say YouTube could break even this year for the first time, after five years of large losses generated by its high bandwidth and storage costs.
Two billion views a day before you hit break even, that is a little risky for me.
Ed Bott:
“Old news”? Obi-Wan Kenobi can get away with that kind of hand-waving. The CEO of a public company with a market cap of $18 billion can’t. I intend no criticism of Paczkowski, who did an excellent job under the circumstances, but Geschke’s statement demands some serious fact-checking.
Steve Jobs (as reported in the post):
By the way, what have you done that’s so great?
I don’t think Ryan Tate is an idiot for emailing Steve Jobs, but the complete lack of respect that he shows throughout this email chain makes him an idiot bordering on being a moron.
Michael Liedtke:
The incident has prompted Google to abandon its effort to collect Wi-Fi network data. In an apparent show of its commitment to privacy, Google also said it will introduce a new option next week that will allow its users to encrypt searches on its Web site as an added protection against unauthorized snooping.
Good response to a potentially damaging issue. Still it should have never happened.
Tom Leighton as interviewed by the WSJ:
The problem is that you’re going to be increasing the expectations of end users, and the data centers can’t keep up. People think about the “last mile” of broadband (the last link that extends broadband to users). But if there’s not an adequate server at the other end, you’re not getting those 100 megabits per second. The bottleneck is upstream.
This is an email that Brian Lam editor for Gizmodo sent to Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs. My favorite bit is below.
Brian Lam via Jason Snell:
Something like that — from you or apple legal — is a big story, that would make up for giving the phone back right away. If the phone disappears without a story to explain why it went away, and the proof it went to apple, it hurts our business. And our reputation. People will say this is a coordinated leak, etc.
Also trying to extort the Apple CEO via email for better access to the company hurts your reputation. This is the whiniest email, that is masked with ‘professionalism’. Also Gizmodo has lost any reputation that they had at this point, and is in its final weeks (in my opinion).
In these documents Apple claims that Gizmodo broke the phone when they took it apart. Also it details how the phone may have been lost/stolen. I still think stolen is the name of the game here.
A lot of people wanted to know the course of events, the documents are now unsealed and it appears it was Brian Hogan’s roommate who called the cops.
Kim Zetter for Wired.com:
Martinson turned Hogan in, because Hogan had plugged the phone into her laptop in an attempt to get it working again after Apple remotely disabled it. She was convinced that Apple would be able to trace her Internet IP address as a result. “Therefore she contacted Apple in order to absolve herself of criminal responsibility,” according to the detective who wrote the affidavit.
and:
The tip sent police racing to the home of 21-year-old Brian Hogan, and began a strange scavenger hunt for evidence that a friend of Hogan’s had scattered around this Silicon Valley community. Police recovered a desktop computer stashed inside a church, a thumb drive hidden in a bush alongside the road, and the iPhone’s serial-number stickers from the parking lot of a gas station.
Why hide this stuff unless you actually stole the phone?
Also note the following:
An Apple spokeswoman told Threat Level that Apple officials took Martinson’s tip directly to the district attorney’s office, and did not show up at Hogan’s house, as a Wired.com source claimed last month.
and:
Apple also told the police that the publication of Gizmodo’s story was “immensely damaging” to the company, because consumers would stop buying current generation iPhones in anticipation of the upcoming product. Asked the value of the phone, Apple told the police “it was invaluable.”
That last bit is the exact reason Gizmodo and everyone else involved in what I am now going to call a theft, is so very screwed.