Monday iMac Moment

August 30, 2004

The news is back! I’m at the airport waiting for my monthly flight to Toronto. Next week: Sitges, Spain for the Pearson International Sales Conference. I’d rather be in Paris today.

Supposedly, that’s where Apple will unveil the new, G5 based iMacs today at MacWorld Expo. I keep checking Apple.com for an announcement but nothing so far.

The first African-American astronaut took flight in 1983. Lord Rutherford, who discovered the atomic nucleus, was born in 1871. President Carter was attacked by a rabbit on a canoe trip in Plains Georgia in 1979.

The Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams, was born in 1918. Bill Gates’s bridge partner, Warren Buffet is 74. Happy 34th Birthday, Cameron Diaz.

On the other hand, maybe I’d rather have an Orion. Orion Multisystems announced its multi-processor cluster workstation based on the Transmeta Efficeon chip and runing Linux. Each motherboard can host up to 12 processors. The top of the line DS-96 deskside Cluster Workstation has 96 nodes and claims 300 gigaflops peak performance, 150 Gflops sustained, with up to 192 gigabytes of memory and up to 9.6 terabytes of storage. The company said it consumes less than 1500 watts and fits unobtrusively under a desk for just $100,000.
Intel has announced a chip size breakthrough. The company has created a prototype chip that packs 10 million transistors into an area the size of the tip of a ball-point pen. The 65 nanometer chip will go into production next year.
Call Longhorn Windows 2006. Or 2007. Something like that. Microsoft says it will ship the next version of its Windows operating system in around two years. But with a schedule like that don’t expect some of the promised new features, like WinFS - the highly touted databasing file system.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other California cities and counties are suing Microsoft. The class action suit attacks Microsoft for it’s monopolistic business practives. SF City Attorney Dennis Herrera says, “It’s anticompetitive, it’s predatory, and it denies consumers, and in this case taxpayers, the benefits of innovation that a free marketplace should provide.” The local governments are seeking millions in damages.
Slashdot reports that Kevin Mitnick’s Caller ID trick will soon be available to everyone. The Caller ID Falsification Service will allow you to enter the number you’re calling, and the number you’d like to appear as the id. Within a couple of seconds the site will call you back with your connection. Star38.com will launch September 1.

Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.

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Tags: Blogging

Friday’s Free Swim

August 13, 2004

Lick me Some news is better than no news and that’s what you’ll get next week when I’m on vacation.

Meanwhile, happy birthday Alfred Hitchcock. I think I’ll send him a card with my new Leo Stamp.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 is now available through Windows Update. However, some problems have been reported. Might be worth waiting a bit before upgrading. I’ve had no problems on two systems, but Andy Walker has reported that the Windows Update verdestroyed one of our systems.
Jeffrey Lee Parsons, a 19-year-old from Minnesota, has plead guilty to creating and spreading the Blaster-B worm. He based it on the original Blaster whose author remains at-large. Parsons is not the brightest banana in the bunch - he simply rewrote the original virus to make it nastier, and then distributed it under his own chat handle, making it easy for cops to track him down. It’s unlikely they’ll ever catch the guy (or gal) who really started it.
DVD Jon is at it again. First he breaks the CSS encryption on DVDs, then he cracks the iTunes Music Store copy protection, now he claims to have broken the encryption in Apple’s Airport Express Wi-Fi device, allowing it to be used for more than just iTunes music sharing.
Google’s Initial Public Offering was almost delayed again, this time because founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin have revealed too much in the pages of Playboy. The auction is scheduled to begin today amid fears that the interview may have violated the SEC mandated Quiet Period. (Although I notice that Google’s lawyers have added the interview transcript to the official prospectus). No action has been forthcoming from the SEC so if you registered in time, point your browsers to ipo.google.com and let the bidding begin.

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Tuesday’s Tribal Drum

August 10, 2004

OK I’m back from Toronto and after collapsing for 24 hours, I’m ready to resume our normal broadcast day. Maybe it’s the Prozac in the water?

The Smithsonian was founded on this day in 1846. The Netscape IPO launched the Internet bubble in 1995.

There’s a serious security flaw in AOL’s Instant Messenger that could give a hacker access to an unwitting user’s computer. AOL has yet to patch the bug.
Microsoft has finally released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP - the long awaited major security fix for Windows. People are so anxious to get a copy that they’re not waiting for it to appear on Windows Update. It’s being distributed on the peer-to-peer file sharing networks usually reserved for music swapping. I recommend people wait until it’s available on Windows Update later this month. It’s a 272 megabyte download from the file sharing networks. It will be much smaller from Windows Update because you will only download the parts of the update that you need. If you must, download the full version now from Microsoft directly.
IBM is telling its employees to wait to install the update. According to IDG, in a note headlined “To patch — or not to patch” posted Friday on its corporate intranet, IBM tells its employees not to download SP2 when it becomes available because of compatibility issues.
Not to be left out, Apple is shipping a 43 megabyte update to OS X today along with a separate security update that patches handling of PNG images. Mac OS 10.3.5 improves Bluetooth performance and updates video drivers. Software update will pull down the updates automatically.
The google IPO is inching closer. Google settled a patent lawsuit by Yahoo yesterday to clear the decks for the offering by giving Yahoo 2.7 million shares of stock - the settlement will cause Google to post a loss in its first quarter as a public company.
A nasty virus has been spreading fast since yesterday. The Bagle variant usually has the words price or price quote in the body of the message, the attached file contains the virus and will infect your machine if you open it.
The FTC has shut down D-Squared, a company that was using Windows Messenger Service to spam computers with pop-up ads. The company was accused of harassing users with spam messages as often as every 10 minutes.
San Francisco’s 9th Circuit Court has ruled that an Arizona sheriff violated prisoners’ rights by broadcasting images of them being booked to the Internet. Judge Richard Paez wrote that the Webcasts amounted to little more than a “reality show” and went beyond what would be considered a reasonable deterrent to crime.