Jay Haynes

Apple Blue Screen of Death?

Daring Fireball.

Looks like Logitech is doing its best to make a Mac behave like a Windows Machine.

The evidence as of this writing indicates that every single instance of a “blue screened” botched Leopard upgrade is attributable to the presence of APE...

The most common route is Logitech Control Center, the mouse “driver” software from Logitech. “Driver” in quotes because it’s utterly absurd and completely irresponsible for Logitech to base their mouse software on a completely and utterly unsupported-by-Apple system software modification.

World's fastest Vista laptop is a Mac

From Fake Steve.

But a very real story.

White House Altered Climate Change Testimony

washingtonpost.com.

Documents obtained by The Washington Post show that White House officials heavily edited testimony on global warming delivered to Congress yesterday by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, downplaying the specific health problems that could arise.

Very bloody scary

"Very bloody scary" as a colleague of mine said.

An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to be released next month will show that the limit on greenhouse-gases scientists hoped to avert has already been surpassed.

In Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel "Fahrenheit 451," that number represented the temperature at which books would burn, a symbol of a disturbing future under a totalitarian government.

For climate scientists, a similar number, 450 parts per million (ppm), holds its own ominous meaning. It represents a dangerous concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; a total that they were not expecting to be passed for at least another decade.

But a new UN-sponsored report, to be released next month, will show that as of 2005 the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere had already reached 455 ppm, according to Tim Flannery, a prominent Australian climate scientist who says he's seen the raw data that go into the document.

Knocking the cover off the ball

Apple's quarterly numbers.

Apple made more profit on average each week last quarter than it did in all of 2003.

Apple sold 1.12 million iPhones, topping Jobs's July forecast of 730,000 units.

"They knocked the cover off the ball,'' Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies in Wayland, Massachusetts, said in an interview.

I swear...

Link: Steven Pinker.

THE STRANGE EMOTIONAL power of swearing--as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures-- suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words' denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

Warrantless wiretapping in place before 9/11

Think Progress.

Today, the Washington Post publishes additional details about the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping, noting that the National Security Agency approached Qwest “more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” But the Body Politik’s Igor Volsky points out that President Bush has claimed that the program was put in place in response to 9/11:

"After September the 11th, I vowed to the American people that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack. As part of this effort, I authorized the National Security Agency to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations." [5/11/06]

Kagro X adds, “If Qwest’s competitors were already abetting this bloodless(?) coup before 9/11, then the ‘administration’s’ domestic spying not only has little if anything to do with response to terrorism, but it also objectively failed to prevent 9/11.”

Bush Pushes for Telecom Immunity

Of course he does. Because he wants immunity for his own crimes.

washingtonpost.com.

President Bush said Wednesday that he will not sign a new eavesdropping bill if it does not grant retroactive immunity to U.S. telecommunications companies that helped conduct electronic surveillance without court orders.

A proposed bill unveiled by Democrats on Tuesday does not include such a provision. Bush, appearing on the South Lawn as that measure was taken up in two House committees, said the measure is unacceptable for that and other reasons.

And Apple should license OS X...

It is a sign of the iPhone's success that everyone wants to give Apple advice (and criticize its strategy).

Here is a classic example from BusinessWeek via TUAW.

Arik Hesseldahl has a thoughtful article up today over at BusinessWeek, describing why he won't be buying an iPhone any time soon. There are far too many great lines to quote here so go read the entire post. Hessendahl call's Apple's no-third-party development stance ridiculous.

Personally, I absolutely love the iPhone and the killer app is: it just works! I had a Treo and had to install a couple third party apps to make it work, which caused it to crash all the time (thus changing the definition of "make it work").

Even if Apple does ship an iPhone SDK, it will take a seriously, seriously killer app for me to risk the performance of my phone on some sub par programming.