Haha - pretty funny.

I like Pirated Edition. ;-)

http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/

I mean, could you refute the lack of excitement these ‘test subjects’ showed. After all they didn’t even touch the workstation for what I could see, and the whole test was more of a presentation or non-hands-on demo. If you add a rattling noise or a cricket at any point when they’re made aware it is Vista what they’re experiencing, it could not have been more appropriate.

In any case, I think they should think about naming their experiments and the outcome carefully. Or some may say “The Mojave Experiment was a success, it feels arid, not much too see or feel there, Vista will leave you feeling like you’re… in a desert.

And I am not alone with this sentiment of failure, read this post at Microsoft Watch: Why the Mojave Experiment Fails

Of course, being a Solaris junkie, I’m excited. This has been out for awhile, but it hasn’t received much press. I’m installing Windows right now on my Solaris machine at work. So far, so good. I don’t care if it’s going to be all that slow, it’ll save me time from dual-booting in the long run. Plus, I can install the various Linux distros I need to work with as well. Very nice!

Oh, yeah, and its free.

The most amazing thing about this is happening under the hood: the developer wrote a library that abstracts browser rendering engines using Canvas, SVG and Flash (on a per-need basis) into a unified language – Objective J which is – as the name suggests – a mapping from Objective C to JavaScript.

Neat.

The best feature… an emergency hand pump allowing for operation when the power is cut to your building and the ninjas are about to get your drives. :)

Gawker.com: Does Web 2.0 Benefit Only the Tech Elite?

Original article

This was interesting in that the blogger points out that we’re so quick to adopt new technologies and new ways to use the Internet, ie Web 2.0, that we’ve caused issues with consuming the tools we have that more tools get invented to handle the new tools. Maybe we should figure out how to fully utilize the tools we have rather than getting invested in creating yet another tool…maybe I’m just old fashioned and think getting a job done well, rather than finding a new job when life gets tough, has some merit.

In other news:

Apple Air vs. Lenovo ThinkPad X300

Finally, someone uses Apple’s advertising against them, to their advantage…

Okay - I want like 10 or so of these. First, I can make my Mac Mini a dual-head box. Actually, I’ll make it a triple head, since I recently upgraded my 17″ LCD to a 20″, making my triple-head setup now all 20″ displays. Then, I’ll make my other three workstations all triple head. Then I’ll make my laptop a quad-head (3 of these plus the laptop display).

Scratch all that. I want 30 or so and I want every machine I own to have six heads.

I’m gonna need more 20″ LCD displays….


Also, check out this video of a similar product in action:

After a great time at this SXSW2008, I must say it is the place to be if you’re in any field of technology. I have been to many conferences, Symposiums and such, but SXSW is by far the best one in recent years. I enjoyed the Music, Film and Interactive festivals. You get to meet interesting people: musicians, filmmakers, actors, producers, geeks, creatives and human-like characters.

This year’s panels that I thought were a must and then spawn a lot of sentiment, rage, or made it to the news were:

Mark Zuckerberg interview by Sarah Lacy, twitterers from everywhere exploded badly, but don’t take my work for it, there is a great place where everything is well detailed.

http://scobleizer.com/2008/03/11/audience-of-twittering-assholes/

and here is video from the interview, judge yourself:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/mark-zuckerberg-sarah-lacy-interview-from-sxsw/

I actually think the interview was to generic, it would be great for a business conference, but here you have technology people all gather together, we all know who Mark is, and we had actual technical questions and wanted to hear technical or technology related information. What I was actually glad to see is how open Mark was to talk to people, I had the opportunity to talk with him at the Facebook party. He is a very approachable person.

Also a great panel was the ‘Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again’ which had Brendan Eich, who invented JavaScript and is CTO of Mozilla; Chris Wilson worked on every version of IE that you’ve used; Charles McCathieNevile is the public face of standards at Opera, hosted by Arun Ranganathan, System Architect.

What it was unfortunate is that Apple didn’t send, at Aruns request, anyone from the Safari team. This actually was a let down, but if Apple does not care to send anyone, then they cannot defend themselves, which is their own fault. Apple missed a great opportunity, and probably they thought all of these developers would had been tough on them, as it should be.

http://www.appscout.com/2008/03/sxsw_browser_wars_become_brows.php

I was actually impressed by the amount of people with iPhones, and Apple Laptops, definitely the majority, I would like to set a poll or if anyone could bring some statistics back from SXSW, please do.

The Google party and the Facebook party were great, I will be posting a few photos of the events and of some sessions. Anyway, if I saw you, talked to you or anything alike at SXSW, please drop me a line.

Great events, great nightclubs, great place, Austin.

Toshiba has developed a new class of micro size Nuclear Reactors that is designed to power individual apartment buildings or city blocks. The new reactor, which is only 20 feet by 6 feet…can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, about half the cost of grid energy.

We are pleased to announce that TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released. Among the new features are the ability to encrypt a system partition or entire system drive (i.e. a drive where Windows is installed) with pre-boot authentication, pipelined operations increasing read/write speed by up to 100%, Mac OS X version, graphical interface for the Linux version, XTS mode, SHA-512, and more.

We use truecrypt at my new job to encrypt our off-site backups (which are portable drives located on-site briefly during backup then taken off-site again). It seems to work fairly well and removes the “what if” factor of having the backup stolen from my apartment.

I’ve been using a mix of TrueCrypt and encrypted DMG images on my flash drives to have portable personal data (and other secure shit). Now, I can get rid of the encrypted DMGs and not worry about having to have access to a Mac in order to read them.

GUIs for the 3 major OSes and full-HD encryption for Windows?  Rock on, TrueCrypt, rock on.