This is official and on the Apple Support Page, the MacBook Pro should only work 2 years from the date of purchase, even if sold with defective components.
$1999 for the “entry-level” laptop, sold with defective chips (nVidia’s GPU: GeForce 8600M GT), known as defective by nVidia, and now by Apple, and wtf the reaction? Just to said that it’s the consumer that will pay after the first 2 years for that!
Real nice
Since the very first days, there was some attacks on my 2 blogs, with faked links for pseudo-casinos and now pseudotrackback links.
Do as I do, never use an untrusted link, never use your main browser for opening an untrusted link, if you want to, use a secondary different browsing software that didn’t have any access to your accounts, and without any other open page. It prevent many many browser attacks.
BackBlaze presented an online backup system similar to TimeMachine but totally online, with a well-designed security, and recovery options:
On the security side, your datas are transmitted over SSL encryption, disabling anyone to get them on the net, and the ability to encrypt them by a private key to be sure that even in case of Blaze system’s being hacked, your datas will stay encrypted and safe. Nice point!
On the recovery side, it naturally offers the ability to recover any file you are saving, with a good interface, but there’s an alternative to retrieve hundreds of gigabyte of datas in case of lost computer, fire, stolen computer or hard-disk total failure: they send you a USB hard-drive with your full backup set inside! Great!
It even let you backup on the road, on an hotel, anywhere in the world, or recover your files from any location. I will be happy if they add a web interface to enable access to your files from a single browser (cybercoffee, hotel, etc).
All that for $5/month ($50/year), except for the recovery hard-drive, at 200$ with a night delivery, price tag is really correct!
There’s some drawbacks, naturally, the price seems high for home-user, with $150/3 years, the price tag of a 1TB backup hard-drive with the speed of local hard-drive instead internet communication (200X faster average!).
And talking about speed, on my high-speed cable Internet access, when I put 15GB of Photos inside my laptop (a day of shooting sessions), it will takes less than 15 minutes to backup them on an USB2 external hard-drive, but more than 2 days (and probably 3 or 4) to backup by Internet, letting the laptop always connected, without any pause, it’s irrealistic!
So BackBlaze is a real great backup system, but not targeted at user that have huge multimedia files (or huge files), and it may be real great for SOHO or mid-size companies to outsource their backups with flexibility!
The GPS Global Positioning System has been conceived by the US Army for it’s internal use and has been widely adopted all around the world, from cross-country runners to airplane positioning, and natyurally cars GPS.
The US Army don’t hesitate to “scramble” the GPS injecting random variation of position in their satellites system, for example during the Gulf War. Consumer GPS systems will render inaccurate informations, precision going from 5 meters or less to 100 meters, rendering consumer GPS less reliable during a conflict to avoid misuse by ennemies.
Naturally, everyone using a consumer-level GPS near Irak was targeted, whatever it’s use of the GPS system.
Yesterday, Apple decided to remove GPS-ability from Egyptian iPhone, wherever you use it, and for any iPhone used with an Egyptian cell carrier (even if used by roaming for foreigners in Egypt).
Now, US Army, and some big companies like Apple may decide who could use the GPS system, and who couldn’t use it, putting the GPS system as a commercial weapon as well as a war weapon, and breaking it’s neutrality.
OCZ Slate ExpressCard SSD
These 3 cards, of 8GB, 16GB or 32GB are presented by OCZ as SSD integrated into ExpressCard port. But instead relying on PCI-E X1 port (250MB/s), they use the USB port available on the ExpressCard specification, and these “SSD” are only offering USB-key performance level : 18MB/s read, 12MB/s write speed. Deceiving!