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You can now dual-boot your Intel Mac with Windoze

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

Again, I still don’t see why you would want to pay a boatload extra cash for the hardware design, then use an inferior OS, but hey, that’s just me. Apple had to do this after gorn and that other guy did it independently.

Windows can run on intel Macs. Why anyone would want to pay the premium for Apple hardware and industrial design while also putting an inferior OS on said hardware is beyond me.

Up next: how to mod your Jaguar into a Toyota Camry

If I ever get cable, I’m totally going to build my own PVR with Ubuntu linux, a TV tuner card, and a small form factor case. You know, like this guy. (his step by step is nice, with plenty of pictures)

Why pay $16/mo? The daunting part is the setup, but tinkering is in a monkey’s nature, no?

Up to 32GB now

Samsung is first to announce a Flash storage device that aims to completely replace the traditional hard drive in some mass market mobile computers. The 32 GB solid state disk (SSD) drive comes in a 1.8″ form factor and reads data at more than twice the speed of hard drives. Best of all: The SSD is promised to consume 95% less power than a hard drive.

The power consumption part is huge. You know how much longer our laptops can run without having to churn their harddrives? If the SSDs can replace the HDDs, this will be huge. Huge!

Too bad Dad’s birthday is passed, because he’d totally totally want this robot koi.

Ryomei Engineering (a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries), in cooperation with two other Hiroshima-area engineering companies, has developed a robot resembling a koi carp. The robot was demonstrated at a pond on the grounds of Hiroshima Machinery Works.

The robot is modeled after a Nishiki koi carp as a form of tribute to Hiroshima Castle (whose nickname Ri-jo means Koi Castle). The 80-cm (31-inch), 12-kg (26-pound) fish has a white body with bright red spots. Though the tail movement is very smooth and lifelike, the remote-controlled koi is capable of moves that a genuine koi is unable to perform, such as swimming in reverse and rotating in place.

Don’t lose hope, Dad! There’s always father’s day!

Newegg let Anandtech publish photos of their operation. Pretty sweet. Thank you, Satan!

Why, that’s impossible

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.

The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful electric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variety of applications, from non-destructive testing to detecting explosives and scanning luggage at airports. The new results are described in the Feb. 10 issue of Physical Review Letters.

Cold fusion, baby! We’re gettin there.

Or it could be alllll gone tomorrow

That’s when the Kama Sutra computer worm will begin destroying critical files on infected computers. And hundreds of thousands of machines may have the worm lurking within their Windows operating system, ready to be unleashed on February 3 and the third of every month thereafter.

Experts say Windows Office documents, Word documents, Excel spread sheets, and PDFs (portable document format) are among the files that will be “overwritten.” That means the data will be changed and corrupted, and the original information will no longer be accessible.

While files that have simply been deleted can sometimes be recovered; overwritten files are usually lost for good.

Then again, that’s what you get for using a proprietary OS.

Yeah, its about the money. Bill Gates is helping the Despots in China turn the Information Super Highway into an Information Goat Path.

Nothing sinister here according to Microsoft. Microsoft Web Log Hosting simply terminated Chinese user Zhao Jing’s Web Log account for violating Microsoft’s code of Conduct. Microsoft’s Code of conduct says that you have to be in compliance with local laws. Local Law in China says you can’t speak out against the party line.

Microsoft says they are following the rules just like every other country that does business in China.

Yeah. Wouldn’t want to give up your market share just standing on democratic principle would you?

A most excellent idea.

GNU developers have released a telephony stack, an open source alternative to competing proprietary VoIP solutions. The GNU telephony stack provides a sacalable environment for building and deploying enterprise level VoIP solutions compatible with current standards and hardware. With an emphasis on modularity and extensible functionality, the GNU telephony stack can be integrated with other systems and services like web servers and databases.

I maintain that open source is the greatest force for democracy and enrichment of the commons currently extant. I’m all for anything that strengthens or improves that, and innovative solutions that allow people to both increase their knowledge and avoid proprietary solutions is a Good Thing.

Security, baby, security. There is yet another unpatched and highly dangerous security exploit in the wild. The exploit goes past all known windows detection systems and is unstoppable once it gets ahold of your machine. This has been known for at least a few days (probably a few weeks) and there is still no fix.

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in Windows. Microsoft is also aware of the public release of detailed exploit code that could be used to exploit this vulnerability. Based on our investigation, this exploit code could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the user’s system by hosting a specially crafted Windows Metafile (WMF) image on a malicious Web site. Microsoft is aware that this vulnerability is being actively exploited.

Microsoft has determined that an attacker using this exploit would have no way to force users to visit a malicious Web site. Instead, an attacker would have to persuade them to visit the Web site, typically by getting them to click a link that takes them to the attacker’s Web site. In an e-mail based attack, customers would have to be persuaded to click on a link within a malicious e-mail or open an attachment that exploited the vulnerability. In both the web and email based attacks, the code would execute in the security context of the logged-on user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

What, you want more? How about a security study of internet browsers that showed that IE was unsafe for 98% of the days of 2004 (sometimes with multiple vulnerabilities concurrently) where there was a publicly known remote code execution in Mozilla and no patched release. Opera? 17%. Mozilla? 15% (and of those, 30 days only affected Mac users). C’mon, there’s no reason for IE to have more than 60% market share.

For you WP users out there.

The WordPress community is very proud to present the next generation of WordPress to the world, our 2.0 “Duke” release, named in honor of jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. We’ve been working long and hard to bring you this release, and I hope you enjoy using it as much as we’e enjoyed working on it.

I haven’t upgraded yet. I figure I’ll let the dust settle and some bugs get worked out first. Probably. Maybe. It’ll probably kill my new template I worked so much on these past two days. … not tinkerin taint in my nature… mumblemumble… hey, what’s this button do?

Like the title says, here’s how you can cut down on anonymous spying and decrease your privacy vulnerability in one fell swoop. Somehow, I don’t think this is going to be a hit with the ladies.

With the proliferation of RFID devices and related privacy concerns, it seemed due time to create the RFID Blocking Duct Tape Wallet. There are many ways to prevent Radio Frequency ID tags from being transmitted from devices. I often use my work badge and school ID which both contain RFID tags. With drivers licenses, credit cards, and cash now beginning to contain RFID tags, why not create the wallet.

I was going to write up a summary of what’s been going on and what happened and shizzle, but then defamer wrote a great one.

The ongoing battle between Sacha “Borat” Cohen and Kazakhstan continues to heat up. Round One: the Kazakh government catches Cohen’s act on MTV Europe Awards, and puts out a tersely worded statement along the lines of, “Stop saying we enjoy rape and have given horses the vote.” Round Two: Cohen responds in character on Borat’s website, encouraging the government to “sue this Jew,” and provides examples of recent Kazakh social advancements (“…homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats and age of consent has been raised to 8 years old.”) Round Three raises the stakes to nothing short of a battle for free internet speech, as the Kazakhs shut down the Borat website:

The funny part is… I totally agree with Kazakhstan here. They are the sole owners of the .kz TLD. It is their national property and their realm to do with as they see fit. Some countries, like, oh, Tuvalu sell this property to make some quick dough before their island becomes completely submerged. Others like, oh, the pedophilic incestuous rapist survivors of the Caine mutiny, seem to prefer illegally hijacking the entirety of the country’s top level domain to do with as they see fit. The point is, it’s the property of those countries to do with as they wish.

And if they want to shut down the truthtellers and hide the fact that they are goat-raping pansies, that is entirely their prerogative.

I blogged about this fantastic product idea back in September when it was a theory, but today, it’s a reality.

The hand-cranked laptop, shown for the first time at the U.N.-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), operates at 500MHz, or about half the speed of commercial laptops. It features a low-power display that can be switched from color to black and white to allow viewing in bright sunlight. Many children in developing countries have school outside, Negroponte said.

The machine can be folded in different ways to serve as a computer, electronic book, or media player.

“We designed the device to perform many roles,” said Negroponte, who also heads the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit group. “Learning should be seamless.”

The computer will run “Linux or some other open-source operating system,” Negroponte said.

Applications will also be open-source based, and available in “every single language that people want,” Negroponte said. The MIT professor said he expects the open source community to jump at the opportunity to pitch in with this effort.

The computers will be free to schoolchildren. “Ownership of the computer is absolutely essential,” Negroponte said, pointing out that people generally take better care of things they own. “Have you ever washed a rental car?” he asked.

Choosing the colors–the body is lime green and the crank yellow–was one of the hardest decisions the group had to make, Negroponte said. The colors should convey “a message of playfulness,” he said.

This would be impossible without open source software, of course, in addition to the highly imaginative engineering. Open source is a fundamental force for democracy, modernization, and improvement of the Commons. I’m all for it. I’m also adding this to the “why MS’ operating system and office productivity arms are doomed, reason #320116″ pile.