18 August 2006

Core 2 Duo Double Double Twin Twin-based MacBook Pros (or MacBooks Pro?) will run hotter, not colder, than the current generation. (I don’t usually give much importance to what AppleInsider writes, but I understood as much when I read an Ars Technica primer on Intel CPUs.)

The annoying thing when you start reporting controversial news is that you’re obliged to keep on with it as developments arise. So, here it goes: that infamous wifi vulnerability has nothing to do with the MacBook’s AirPort card, chip, or drivers [via]. That’s Apple’s PR department speaking, but everybody suspected so from the start; for all their flaws, don’t you think they’re a bit unlikely to flat-out lie about having received disclosure information regarding their own drivers?

(But then, Apple released a MacBook firmware update just today, so you might as well conspiracy-theorize away.)

Web 2.0-ish graphics replacements for the QuickTime plugin. Feels nicer, more modern.

[+15h] This patch also changes the QuickTime controls within the iTunes video window. Not a catastrophe, but they feel a bit more out of place there than the original controls did within Safari.

Hands on the Optimus Mini Three. For real. In the flesh. (With a particularly crappy, hardly enticing, cameraphone-like picture.)

And, on the same day, Apple patents the exact same concept. If I read this correctly, they only just applied for it — and it should be overthrown, because Art. Lebedev has supposedly filed theirs earlier.

[+15h] This is the patent application’s publication, not filing date (thx Enro). Which poses the question of the Optimus keyboard’s future; I don’t think they revealed when they filed their own application, but since the publication delay appears to be standard, we should already know it if they had filed it before Apple did.

Scott Adams:

The scary part is that every spam message probably works on at least one person. […] So Barney places his order for the miracle pill and wonders why the Nigerian vendor needs his social security number. […]

I think the government should send spam to all citizens. If someone like Barney tries to buy a miracle pill, the government erases his social security number from their records so he can’t vote. It would solve a lot of problems.

Side note: the purpose of the American social security number is to vote? Figures, I guess. (The surprising part, come to think of it, is that they have such a thing as a social security number.)