Man Bikes Dog

Scuse Me...

....while I kiss the sky.

Monday's Master Plan

It's just another Macish Monday. The new Mac laptops are here. The new Mac laptops are here. Speed bumps to 1.67Ghz, 8x superdrives, and motion sensors for falls. I'm off to the store, but some news before I go... RCA demonstrated the first music synthesizer on this day in 1955. James van Allen discovered the Van Allen Belt in 1958. 3M introduced Scotch Tape in 1961. Ham the chimpanzee soared into space aboard Mercury-Redstone 2, 1961. It's Jackie Robinson's birthday, he was born in 1910.

1. The Norwegian supreme court has overturned a lower court ruling and fined a teenager 100,000 kroner (around $15,000) for linking to illegal music downloads. The student's site, napster.no, did not host any illegal files, it merely pointed to their location, much as, say Google does. The site was a school project, and the precedent is very scary.
2. If you drive a Ford, Toyota, or Nissan don't count on that its tech key code system to keep it from being stolen. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have found a flaw in the key's RFID chip that makes it easy to spoof.
3. Apple won Brandchannel.com's Reader's Choice award as "the brand with the most impact in 2004," beating out Google for the first time. In this case the Readers are brand professionals in 75 countries, not crazed Mac zealots.

4. Nick Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, is proposing a $100 Linux-based computer, display and all, for developing nations. Negroponte went to the World Economic Forum in Davos with his prototype. He has support from AMD. The key is getting display costs down by using an LED projection system.
5. Virus authors have started using .rar files to bypass automated virus filters. The filters know about zip compression, but are clueless about the lesser known rar format. Not for long, I'd guess.
6. So what does Intel's new VIIV trademark portend? The best guess is that it's supposed to be 64 - VI and IV - for Intel's new 64-bit chips. I'm not sure I really care.
7. It's not all over for us old folks, according to the Nielsen Norman Group, adults are more adept at surfing the web than most teens. So there, now get offa my lawn you punks.
8. According to USA Today, there are some pretty funny gaffes in Amazon's new Yellow Pages. For one, they picture Rockefeller Center's skating rink as a bus.
9. Are you ready for Gigabit Wi-Fi? They've got it in the lab!

Listen in tomorrow at 6:45a Pacific for my weekly news commentary on KGO 810 AM in San Francisco.

Scoble and Craig

Listen to the podcast from Bella Luma (with my apologies for the sound quality - next time I bring my recording equipage).

Tuesday's Twitterings

N ewslicious. Finally, I know how to get where I'm going, thanks to the new Google Maps. Friedleib F. Runge, father of paper chromatography, was born on this day in 1795. Science fiction author Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France, 1828.

1. Watch out Intel and AMD. Forget the G5. IBM, Sony and Toshiba unveiled details yesterday of a new microprocessor that contains the equivalent of eight CPU cores around a central coordinating core based on PowerPC. The Cell processor, in development since 2001, starts at over 4 gigahertz, has nearly twice the transistors of the Pentium 4 and can deliver 10 times the performance. Look for it in the new Sony Playstation 3, TVs from Toshiba, and IBM high-end workstation computers coming later this year. Apparently there are several operating systems already running on the Cell in the labs, including Linux. With its PowerPC heritage, it shouldn't be hard to port OS X to it - now that would be a killer product.
2. The FCC released a list of web sites that send cell phone spam on Monday. The sites have 30 days to stop or face fines of $11,000 per violation.
3. The Superbowl spurred the sales of 1.4 million TVs according to the TV Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, many of them high-end flat screens.
4. Microsoft will release 13 patches for Windows XP today, including nine critical updates. Make sure to run Windows Update.
5. But don't believe an email claiming to be from Microsoft with an attached "security" program. It's spyware from Romania, one of many scams circulating the net right now taking advantage of Microsoft's announced "Windows Genuine Advantage" program. Microsoft says it never sends out updates via email.
6. The record industry has hit a new low. They're suing a dead woman. According to her daughter, the 83-year-old West Virginia woman hated computers. According to the RIAA, she traded 700 pop, rap, and rock songs online under the screen name smittenedkitten. The RIAA says they'll drop the case.
7. University of Calgary students will be learning how to create spam and spyware. The university already has a course on virus creation. Now why didn't they teach that kind of stuff when I was in school. Oh, yeah. Because you can't create spam with a slide rule.