Mac OS X 10.4

John Siracusa has done it again. His 106-page "review" of Mac OS X 10.4 is a wonder to behold. Although calling it a review is a bit of a misnomer. If it had been a car John was reviewing, he would have completely disassembled it and critiqued the engineering of all of its major components. Only real geeks need apply, as the level of detail will go over most people's heads.

You Are A Money-Laundering Terrorist

Over the next few years, all banks will begin using new anti-money-laundering software to monitor everyone's banking transactions in detail, profiling your account activity and flagging any unusual transactions for follow-up calls. Watch out, because if they don't like your answers, you can expect Uncle Sam to ask you hard. Read about it in Wired.

Meet Force With Force in Florida

Florida approves ‘force with force’ measure and I rejoice. Of course, not everyone does. In addition to the MSNBC article, The New York Times and The Seattle Times give gun-hating morons who prefer victimization plenty of space to have their say.

All this law says is that when faced with criminal force, you have the right (if you like) to stand your ground; unlike so many other places where you are required to either run away or submit to the will of criminals. You can still be a pussy if that's your nature, you're just not required to be.

But to hear the Sarah Brady's of the world tell it, this will result in daily wild-west shootouts. Every little dispute will result in battles royal with stray bullets hitting babies and grandmothers left and right!

Martin Dyckman of the St. Petersburg Times told tourists, a bedrock of the state's economy, to stay away: "Lebanon might be safer." (ref)

Of course, I side with the lawmakers who passed this legislation. It will simply deter crime by forcing criminals to consider whether their intended victim is likely to pull out a hand cannon and open fire; the odds of which, just went up.

Meet your Meat

Alec Baldwin and the grass-munching, slack-jawed faggots at PETA created a little video called "Meet your Meat." I watched the whole thing, strangely un-moved. Maybe it's because I don't anthropomorphize animals. Maybe it's because I believe that humans, as the dominate species, have the right to use animals in any fashion we see fit. Maybe it's just because I really like cheeseburgers, chicken strips, and ham sandwiches.

Whatever the reason, I'm gonna be sure to go out to Jack-in-the-Box for lunch tomorrow and get some yummy meat! I encourage you to watch the video and make your own choice. Do you have the balls, the stone-cold heart, the shear blood- thirstiness to eat meat? I do, because I'm a real man. Are you?

Mac mini Arrives!

My Mac mini has finally arrived! All of my ordered pieces showed up today: the mini, my 1GB RAM module, and my 19"LCD. My copy of iWork was delivered last week and my nearly-free upgrade for MacOS X 10.4 will be coming soon. Naturally, I'll be setting it up the minute I get home.

I've seen them before at CompUSA but it is still amazing to me just how small this computer is. You almost want to hold it in your arms like a baby. Unfortunately, I'm feeling kind of sick today, so I may not get to play with it much tonight :(

Get Perpendicular!

Hitachi recently announced that they've come up with a way to arrange the magnetic elements of hard drives perpendicularly, allowing for 20GB microdrives (like the 6GB one in the iPod mini) and 1TB desktop drives in 2007.

Want to know how it works but don't have the engineering knowledge to understand the white papers? No problem, just check out this groovy music video Hitachi cooked up!

GMail Unlimited

Last Friday, Google's GMail went to effectively unlimited e-mail storage. Officially, they bumped it to 2GB and are now continuously raising that limit for their most demanding users. In other words, you can have as much storage as their heaviest user and if you exceed it then you become the heaviest user and they'll raise the ceiling for you.

So, why not just call it unlimited? Well, because this way they can limit it if they need to. If too many people build up 100GB mailboxes or whatever, they can put on the brakes. Also, they get to have a counter on their main page that ticks up as the limit increases. Hotmail and Yahoo don't have that and probably never will.