Floating in a sea of serendipity…
Merl Ledford, the lawyer for Barry and Cathy Merchant decided to respond to the RIAA’s (extortion) letter demanding money for alleged music downloads. Among issues raised were filing at the incorrect venue, emotional distress, lawyers not licensed for practicing law, attorneys who file litigation without probable cause are personally liable and much more.
Essentially - the RIAA got smacked pretty hard by someone who knows better. Read the letter from Recording Industry vs People here.
Gordon Kelly vents over the recent Apple ads by using the “cold hard stats” of the “Symantec Internet Security Threat Report” for July - December 2006 to paint a picture that Windows is more secure than Mac OS X for getting a mere 4 mixed bag vulnerabilities without fully breaking down what kind they are and how severe they would be.
Reading the report:
Windows has an average patch time of 21 days for 39 vulnerabilities vs Mac OS X at 66 days for 43 vulnerabilities.
The break down for Windows was 12 high, 20 medium and 7 low. Mac OS X was 1 high, 31 medium and 11 low.
Interestingly, Windows patch response times rose from 13 days to 21 days, so if Gordon’s reading this, your “cold hard stats” show that Microsoft’s response times got worse from the first half of 2006. Don’t tell that to your readers, though. All vendors got worse response times as they spent longer fixing and patching, not surprising.
Symantec lists vulnerabilities as such here which defines Low, Medium and High. By my measure, 12 vs 1 high security vulnerabilities is nothing to sneeze at, we’re talking possible remote accessible root access, botnets or trojan installations via browsers here.
Browser wise, Internet Explorer leads the pack with 54 vulnerabilities, with Mozilla at 40, Safari and Opera at 4 each. I use Safari a lot (most Mac OS X users do, unless they upgrade to FireFox). So, basically the chance of getting infected from using the default browser under Windows (IE) is a lot higher than issues with Mac OS X (Safari) if you haven’t kept up to date.
Read the article here from Trusted Reviews.
David Ramel from ComputerWorld compiles his list of the top 10 funniest tech videos currently on YouTube.
See them here.
The secretive Australian inventor Kia Silverbrook has announced the Memjet printer that is able to print full colour pictures at an astounding rate of 1 page per second. This is accomplished by a fixed print head that covers the full width of the page, so it’s able to print an entire width simultaneously.
Read about it here.
Now, if they can ensure the print heads don’t clog up all the time and the quality is good, I’m in.
SPOnG confirms that a new NiGHTS game is close for release on the Wii, if anyone remembers NiGHTS into Dreams and Christmas NiGHTS on the Sega Saturn, it was good fun (albeit a tad short, especially Christmas NiGHTS) with a lot of replayability. Not sure about the whole walking around thing however, most of time I’d be NiGHTS heading through hoops and being in the air. Almost makes me want to get a Wii now.
Read about it here.
Kyle Orland from Joystiq cruised through the Sony PAL Backwards Compatibility web site here to crunch some figures. So far, 43.72% don’t work, 35.69% do work, and 20.59% work with issues (from minor to severe).
Read more here.
I expect future revisions of the firmware should bring that number up, but personally I think Sony should have stuck to including the hardware, worked on the emulation for a future version of the PlayStation 3 including the Cell 0.65 nm core shrink rather than trying to scramble to get it done now for the PAL launch.
Some kind person has released instructions on how to triple boot Mac OS X, Fedora and Windows Vista on a MacBook and other Intel Macs, not bad! Read about it here.
Apparently the first commercial compressed air car will be shortly going into production for the Indian market using technology developed by MDI (Moteur Developpment International) for (initially) Tata Motors. Apparently, using compressed air it obtains 200 - 300 km for 90 m^3 worth of air, costing less than 1 Euro per 100 km and gets a top speed of 110 km/h. Refills can be accomplished in 2 to 3 minutes, or 3 to 4 hours using a small compressor if you want to fill up at home.
Due to the fact that air is cheap and plentiful and the engine works on decompression only, no harmful byproducts or exhaust is generated (they use the cold air exhaust as air conditioning). Apparently 1 litre of vegetable oil is the primary consumable, and needs to be changed about every 50,000 km. The expected price will be about $13,400 Au for £5,500, which is quite cheap!
Read about it here from Gizmag. More details about the engine from MDI here.
All you need is one of these, a solar powered compressor, and you might never need to get a top up again! Hopefully the Australian government will put some more effort into clean transportation, most of the time it’s merely shifting people less than 50 km from home to work, which is a huge pollution problem.
Dave sent on this link from Slashdot about how IT is getting Dilbertised which I can relate to quite a bit of late. It seems IT is being viewed as a commodity that can be made efficient easily (thanks to Microsoft) and has less credibility due to unscrupulous IT salesmen pushing silicon snake oil promising the solution to all problems when the reality is quite different.
Read about it here.
Ars Technica has a good article from Nate Anderson about how the DMCA is now considered a useful tool by unscrupulous businesses and individuals to control information they are not happy with (in one way or another). Essentially, the freedom of speech in USA is seriously broken now that it’s shoot DMCA takedown letters off first, ask questions later.
Read about it Donald on Ruairà Robinson’s “The Silent City”