Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

At Microsoft Bill Gates is “next” as the expression goes (next to leave). Tomorrow is his last day.

Every Windows user for the past 15 years will appreciate this epic Bill Gates e-mail rant.

A fascinating article in The New Yorker this week — not online — about programming computers to converse. The article begins by discussing interactive-voice-response systems — the automated “service” you get when you call a large company.

You know these systems monitor the calls. Did you know they still monitor you when you are on hold?

Interesting too that one of the programming difficulties for these systems was all the ways people say yes or no. It was particularly a problem for southerners. They tend say “Yes, ma’am” or “Yes, sir” depending on the gender of the voice of the system, and the ma’am or sir threw off the computer

Firefox 3 is out for all platforms. According to reports there have been more than 7 million downloads in 24 hours.

I’ve been using the Mac version of Firefox 3 for a couple of weeks — rather than Safari. I like it.

Firefox web browser | Faster, more secure, & customizable

[T]he data on cellphone safety is mixed, although a few recent international studies have suggested a link with three types of brain tumors. The Food and Drug Administration also says there’s not enough information to determine conclusively whether cellphones are safe or unsafe.

New York Times Blog

CNET has some facts:

Ten highest-radiation cell phones

Ten lowest-radiation cell phones

The sidebar at the CNET cites lists all manufacturers. 1.6 is the U.S. maximum allowed.

Thanks to Bob Ormond for the links.

“Our tests found that leaving a Playstation 3 on while not in use would cost almost… five times more than it would take to run a refrigerator for the same yearly period”.

NYTimes.com

“[I]f all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.”

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M.

NYTimes.com

My cell phone that is. I think I’ve lost my cell phone. I guess I’ll just have to get a new one. In that case it might as well be an iPhone. As soon as the new model reaches the store.¹

Yup, that’s when I’m going to lose my cell phone — just as soon as the new iPhones reach the store.

¹ July 11th.

My verdict is that Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now, and that it tops the current versions of both IE and Safari in features, speed and security. It is easy to install and easy to use, even for a mainstream, non-technical user. It can be downloaded, free, at mozilla.com by clicking on “Firefox 3 Sneak Peek.”

This situation may change. Microsoft is working on a new version of IE, scheduled to be unveiled later this year, with some impressive new features. And Apple is always working on new iterations of Safari, though it is secretive and hasn’t disclosed its plans. But for now, in my view, Firefox 3.0 rules on both Windows and Mac.

I couldn’t find any significant downsides to Firefox 3.0.

From a review by Walt Mossberg.

NewMexiKen generally relies on Safari on my two Macs, but I have been playing around with the new Firefox and it looks pretty good. (I use IE7 when I run Windows on the Macs.)

“Google Maps now makes it easy to check out real estate listings in a certain area: click on the “Show search options” link next to the Search Maps button, and choose “Real Estate” from the drop down. Your search will map homes for sale, with photos and prices.”

Lifehacker

If you have a wireless network at home, it is imperative that you encrypt it. (While recently in Virginia I was able to see the files on an iMac on the next street over.)

NewMexiKen isn’t knowledgeable enough to tell you how to go about this, but I can explain some of the basics.

• Wireless encryption and a firewall are both essential — they do different things
• The first standard was WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy)
• WEP is better than no protection at all
• WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) was introduced in 2003
• WPA2 was an update to WPA in 2004
• WPA (and WPA2) are far superior to WEP
• If your wireless router, computer wireless card(s) or the associated software is older than 2003, you probably won’t be able to use WPA
• Newer products — and the Wii, PlayStation 3, PSP, XBox 360, iPhone — can use WPA, but not all of them can use WPA2
• WPA and WPA2 have two configurations: Personal and Enterprise
• If you use a good network password, WPA or WPA2 Personal is sufficient for a home network

Bottom line: Use WPA (or WPA2 if you can) and use a good password for the network. Use WEP if that’s all you’ve got.

Dan Neil takes a hike — with gadgets. He begins:

“Whoso walketh in solitude, and inhabiteth the wood . . . into that forester shall pass . . . power and grace.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

But what if I snap my ankle? Or blow a cardiac gasket? Or fall or get stuck on a mountain where I can’t go up or down, what climbers call getting “cliffed out”? What then, Ralph Waldo? I won’t give a tinker’s damn about power and grace then. I’m going to be looking for that orange-and-white rescue whirligig in the sky. Swing low, sweet Stokes litter.

Going solo into the backcountry — or on a sailboat around Catalina, or on a mountain bike in Moab, Utah, for that matter — always implies a trade-off, the exchange of safety for reverie. Nearly always, the risk is worth it, and for all the reasons Emerson made a career of. To be alone in big-N nature is to challenge yourself, to calibrate yourself, to fully inhabit the body you were born with, to feel the chill of the absolute run up your spine.

But things can go very wrong.

I thought that whole Google Maps street view thing was pretty cool until I looked at photos of Casa NewMexiKen today.

Yikes!

Have a Mac? Need info? Right click on any word in Mail, Safari, iWork or most other Mac OS X applications and the Dictionary pops up — giving you instant information from a dictionary, thesaurus and/or Wikipedia (somewhat slow).

If you’d like a little image to show up next to your comments (very small in the Latest Comments section in the sidebar, not so small next to the actual comment), you will need to sign up for a Gravatar — a Globally Recognized Avatar.

Sign up requires an email address and a password, uploading the image you want to use (and cropping it), a few other minor tweaks, and voila wherever you comment using that email address the image (the gravatar) will appear — well, it will appear if the particular website or blog is configured for gravatars, as NewMexiKen now is.

The hardest part for me was choosing an image — something I still haven’t settled on.

Charlie Rose Saves His MacBook Air

Thanks to Avelino for the link.

BTW, check out Avelino’s New York Recap. Awesome photos.

Since it was made available, NewMexiKen has used Google’s gmail for all my email. Here’s why:

1. It’s free.
2. I wanted an email service I could easily access on any computer, anywhere there was internet access.
3. I wanted an email provider that wouldn’t change. (Remember @home.com?) I figured Google was going to be around for a while.
4. I had tried Microsoft and Yahoo! and didn’t like the clutter of their web-based email.
5. I wanted to use my email with Outlook (now I use it with Apple Mail). Gmail permits that; HotMail did, but weirdly; Yahoo did but you had to upgrade ($).
6. Gmail’s spam filters are excellent, catching about 99% of all spam. The spam never gets to my computer. I never see it.
7. I am able to forward email from older email addresses (such as @comcast.net) through gmail, so I don’t have to worry about getting everybody to change their address book.
8. Now gmail has IMAP (rather than POP) mail. IMAP automatically syncs my gmail with any mail application — Apple Mail on two computers, my iPod touch and online. If I delete a message one place, it goes away and isn’t cluttering up my mailbox next time I open one of the other email programs.
9. If I delete a message inadvertently, it stays available in gmail’s trash — on the web — for 30 days.
10. It’s free.

Gmail

The $100 Eye-Fi Card by Eye-Fi Inc. (www.eye.fi) is a two-gigabyte SecureDigital memory card with a built-in wireless chip. It slips into any camera with an SD-card slot, and whenever the camera is turned on, looks for a familiar Wi-Fi network and uploads your photos to your Mac or PC and one of 17 photo-sharing sites. After a quick, one-time setup, the user does nothing more than turning on the digital camera.

Read more at The Mossberg Solution.

Thanks to Avelino, a funny story about a guy and his Macs: How I Spent $5,000 on Air and Made Fifty-Year-Old Women Swoon.

Mac aficionados (if you know any) will appreciate. Windows guys/gals will shake their head.

Tutorials for the first time Macintosh user from OS X Help. Begins with the basics (the power switch) but there are things to learn for children of all ages.

Yesterday I mentioned the Lindsay Lohan photo spread in New York Magazine and my abbreviated plan to generate some bogus Google traffic. In the end, as I put it, I decided I’d “[j]ust rely on the old standbys … — you know, Omarosa.”

Here are the top searches at NewMexiKen this morning:

omarosa
omarosa nude
omarosa naked
omarosa nude pics

After yesterday’s New York Times piece reporting rumors of an alleged affair between John McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman, her firm Alcalde & Fay, pulled her bio off their Web site.

Of course, the Web doesn’t work quite that way, so you can check out a cached version over at the Internet Archive.

Election Geek Blog

Not that Ms. Iseman’s bio is worth your time, but it’s still amazing what people don’t understand about the internets.