It’s here: SONY’s response to the iMac. The Lamp like iMac G4 that is. Released exactly 5 years and one day ago.
The dutch are very nice people. They telco “kpn” however sucks. Sucks. As, to be precise. They have hotspots. That would be cool. They ride on this craze that you have to pay money for wifi. OK. That usually is a bad idea, as long as companies want this privilige exclusively. The KPN login screen is the most obscure login form I have encountered. Keys are being remapped. Worst of all: In Firefox on OS X you are prompted with a blank screen when you credit card info is supposed to go through. Nothing happened. For minutes. I then tried Safari, which was pretending to work. Of course new windows popped up and all that other javascript nonsense was still there. After fifteen minutes KPN then charged the firefox trans action it seemed, even though the firfox window never showed a page. So now I spend twice as much for a crappy connection.
I hope that we get quickly to the phase where there will be competitng systems for wifi access everywhere. That would take care of a cheap and stupid hack like KPNs wifi access within weeks.
Update:
A little bit later I at least could use the KPN hot spot extra minutes that they shoved down my throat and took my money for while waiting for the 747 to get ready. I thought I keep some minutes for later. But they managed for they pop up that allows you to logout not to show up when you use the wifi at the airport. Worked in the hotel. Once you have a bunch of looser code something it really all starts to suck. What a poor showing. I simple have to use up the extra KPN minutes now. It’s only a couple of Euros. But still a rip off. It’s a rip by stupidity, not even intended. KPN is clueless about what they are offering. They fell for a moron coder, and they have no way of telling, since they never use their own product and ignore customer feedback.
So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems.
That’s the NY Times being clueless about Botnets. Good that they write about it. As it is a problem.
Bad that they write so badly about it. The author seems to like ot cover his bases here. “Scattered reports”? God, there are scattered reports about Ant’s playing doom in mongolia. This is as covering. Not more. The reality is that 100% of all botnets are run on Windows machines. There are still no Viruses for OS X. There are MS Office infections that affect the OS X flavor of the product. But the Operating system has been save.
It’s as binary as that. Don’t get me wrong: Apple sucks in some areas. But their OS has had no real life virus infections. People seem to shy away from such binary truths. Easier to throw in a ‘scattered reports’ here and there. Pseudo Balance. It’s actually much more harmful than it seems: It leaves loopholes. It kills the truth: Somebody with an intention could quote now the New York Times that there have been Botnets on Linux and OS X. Which is a lie. Not true. The big question that needs a real answer is, if Vista can join the club of predomiantly safe operating systems or not. Unfortunately journalists will not help in finding this out.
The only real weapon against malware is the truth.
Too bad that the New York Times is too afraid to avoid it.
Kottke’s link collection for 2007
Lot’s and lot’s ‘copy/download and read later’ items. For me at least.
continue to go badly:
Sony, specifically PS3
Iraq, tied to it the current US administration
next gen DVD formats (HD-DVD and blu-ray)
Yahoo
Microsoft
GM, Ford and Chrysler
continue to do well:
Google
Apple
Toyota
It probably is a sign of age that these days I can look at a site like arkinetia and like all I see, while pretty women are kind of a yawn lately.
Looking at these houses it seems that Modernism was not just a ‘phase’. It seems to come back, and it makes allot of sense. The iPod could have been done by Dieter Rahms. Kinda. The ideas behind modern design and architecture are still valid. For a while ‘mordern’ was also ‘hip’. People accepted it’s easthetics and repeting it’s symbols, whithout needing to get behind the underlying ideas. Of course this kind of ‘hollow reign’ never lasts.
When modernism comes back now, then I hope that it does for the reason that more people are ready for the underlying view of human life. Not because rectangular is the new black. Time will tell.
When the PS3 came out there was allot of media frenzy about the huge ebay prices.
Three days before christmas neither Wii nor PS3 are possible ot find in stores. But @ eBay you can buy them. Just watched a PS3/20GB go for 530 US$ and a Wii for 450US$. The problem for Sony is that the actual retail prices compare differently: 80% markup for the Wii and 6% for the Ps3. Looks like people don’t want the PS3 that bad. Which is really bad: At a whopping 500/600 pricetag and with a considerable install base of the Xbox 360 Sony needs to build some momentum. Sofar they fail to accomplish that. It might become a negative chicken/egg thing: with a not so promising install base game developer might avoid to take the risk of a PS3 development that would use the power of the Cell chip. Innovative ideas might be aimed and tested at the PS2. A known development environment and huge install base. Maybe somebody will make a wii like add on to create similar controllers for it. PS3 has not much going for it, except it’s looks and the fact that it’s the most affordable Bluray player.
007 title sequences YouTube, but better than nothing.