Archives for August 2005

Wow, I’ll bet all those “probably only a category one hurricane” meteorologists feel like idiots. Hurricane Katrina skipped off the tip of Florida and began a lazy arc through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, strengthening into a 160mph category 5 killer hurricane. Look at the picture above (or see the full image at Nasa.gov). Yes… that’s right… it has two solidly defined eye walls. It has a little sugar-coated doughnut hurricane within the big pinwheely one. New Orleans is screwed. It is doubtful that this thing is going to weaken much at all before it hits. The winds near the eye (or eyes) are going to be up in the 240mph range, likely.

Only three category 5 storms (those with sustained winds above 155mph) have hit the United States since records started being kept. They hit in 1935, 1968, and 1992. Andrew in 1992 basically leveled Homestead, FL, causing $26.5 billion worth of damage. Here’s a picture of a tugboat sitting in someone’s front lawn.

If you’re in the affected areas… just get out. Possibly 10 people are already dead from Katrina, and that was when it was a category 1 hurricane. Take your family, your valuables, and get out. This isn’t some “tape up your windows” game… this is the storm of the decade.

Apple’s announcement that they were going to move to the x86 architecture was a bit surprising. The PPC platform has always functioned as a pedestal of sorts. It’s one of those things that doesn’t matter at all to Joe User, but Apple, and Apple fanboys, could cite it as a feature. Now that OSX is going to be running on x86 processors, they’ve lost that.

More importantly, they may just have lost the exclusivity of the PPC platform. If OSX is going to run on the same processors that run Windows, what is to prevent people from running OSX on generic hardware? Not much, as it turns out. To be sure, Apple’s early x86 development kits featured security to prevent that from happening. In a much-disputed move, they included Trusted Computing chips on their development hardware, and put code into OSX to require the TC chip. Trusted Computing is a topic all its own, but the short version is that it’s Big Brother inside your computer telling you what software can run with what hardware, what file formats you can use, and all that bad stuff. It’s such a horrible thought, that Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing contributer, and owner of an Apple tattoo on his right bicep, would consider Trusted Computing to be a deal-breaker if it were included in the final retail product. It is unknown whether or not Apple plans on including it when they launch.

Further complicating things, is the fact that some hackers have managed to remove the restriction requiring the Trusted Computing chip. Now people all over the place are running OSX on their Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 laptops. I’m loathe to say it, but John Dvorak may have been right. Apple would have been stupid not to have seen this coming. You can’t move OSX to the x86 platform and not expect that people are going to run it on generic hardware. Dvorak seems to think that this was their plan all along. Wouldn’t that be great? I’m betting that if Apple and Microsoft could compete head-to-head for PCs, that Apple would win, handily. More and more people are switching to Macs, and Windows XP is long in the tooth, with “Longhorn” or “Vista” nowhere in sight (and years behind OSX Tiger). Things could get really interesting.

I can’t say I’ve never fantasized about doing this, myself.

A man annoyed by a noisy car alarm fired at least three bullets into a Toyota Camry, silencing the alarm and bringing out police who hauled him away in handcuffs, authorities said.

David Owen Rye, 48, was arrested and booked for investigation of reckless discharge of a firearm and felony vandalism, Sgt. John Adamczyk said. Rye allegedly told officers he grabbed his handgun and went out to put a stop to the car alarm.

AP: Man fires gun at car to silence alarm

I’m rather impressed that he actually managed to silence it with three shots.

Apple Computers, after a lifetime (my lifetime, anyway) of only offering only single-button mice, has introduced the Mighty Mouse, their first two-button mouse (yeah, they got permission to use the name from Viacom). Eww… you can’t right-click if you have a finger resting on the left side! The whole body clicks down when you apply pressure, as before, and it uses sensors to determine where your fingers were resting, which lets it know which button you “clicked.” If both fingers are resting, it is a left-click. Given the option of relearning how to use a two-button mouse, or buying one of the excellent Logitech or Microsoft products, which would you choose? I’m guessing that the first step of buying a Mac isn’t going to change:

1. Throw away the mouse and go buy a decent third party two-button one

Paint it white, if it’ll make you feel better.