Moore’s Tech Web Reader - Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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Report: Ultralight MacBook at Macworld
SlashGear's Exclusive Look At The Samsung 64GB SSD in Macbook Pro
Surge In Encrypted Torrents Blindsides Record Biz
Music Biz Sues Robertson Again
Leopard's Preview: Can You Throw Away Your Copy of Acrobat Yet?
Walter Mossberg: Macs Seldom Need Security Software
MIT Students Working On Pedal Powered Laptops
Apple has 'out-Linuxed' Linux with OS X Leopard
Ten Days With Leopard: Coolest Cat Ever
Apple Charges Fortune For Memory Upgrade
PowerBook Medic: Fixing your 'Book Better than the Rest
Are Google, Apple Draining Brains From Space Tech?
Report: Ultralight MacBook at Macworld
Apple 2.0's Philip Elmer-DeWitt says:
Rumors that Apple was set to release an ultralight notebook computer real soon now have been circulating as far back as Dec. 2006.
By July 2007, MacScoop was quoting "trusted sources" that before the end of the year the company would release "a notebook that is so small and light that it could redefine the standards of ultra-portable computing."
Now it's pretty clear that 2007 will come and go without delivering on the rumors.
But in his latest report to clients, Piper Jaffrey's Gene Munster says he's 75% certain that an ultralight MacBook "or possibly an entirely new product" will be coming in January at Macworld Expo.
For the full report click here.
SlashGear's Exclusive Look At The Samsung 64GB SSD in Macbook Pro
SlashGear's Vincent Nguyen reports:
The latest pin-up in the storage world is the Solid-State Drive (SSD), a flash-based drive with no moving parts that can be used in place of a traditional hard disk drive. SSDs are beginning to show up in high-end laptops and - albeit in smaller capacities - in portable media devices, where their low power requirements, resistace to shaking and movement and high data transfer rates make them ideal for high-portability gadgets. SlashGear has been lucky enough to get our hands on one of Samsung's latest 2.5-inch 64GB NAND drives, currently featuring in high-end models from Dell's XPS range and Alienware's Area-51 m9750 notebook as a 128GB RAID array, and thought we'd put the OEM device to the test....
Since Samsung helpfully pointed out that the 64GB SSD would work happily with Windows Vista, XP or Linux, we decided to answer the question most road warriors are thinking and install OS X on it instead. We're currently benchmarking it to see just how much of a difference solid-state can have on Apple's coveted range of laptops, so keep checking SlashGear for part two of our exclusive Samsung SSD review!
To read more, click here.
Samsung 64GB SSD Installed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhZK1Yt6GAI
Click to view all Samsung 64GB SSD pictures/hands-on:
Surge In Encrypted Torrents Blindsides Record Biz
The Register's Chris Williams reports:
The legal crackdown and publicity blitz aimed at people who share music, videos and software online may be having an unintended consequence for the troubled record industry. The number of file-sharers disguising their BitTorrent activity with encryption is skyrocketing.
Figures from a large UK ISP obtained by The Register show that the portion of BitTorrent traffic encrypted by file-sharers has risen 10-fold in the last 12 months, from four to 40 per cent......
While DPI is able to identify and manage encrypted file-sharing packets, it is unable to look inside those packets for copyright infringement.
The trend towards encryption means current efforts by music publishers and government to cut a deal with ISPs to create a monitoring system to boot persistent copyright infringers off the internet, which we revealed last month is likely to be rendered pointless.
Neil Armstrong, products director at BT-owned ISP PlusNet, said: "It isn't possible for us to tell if a customer is downloading a copyright file or not unless we specifically 'snoop' every packet on the customer's line.
"We would obviously only do this where we have a proper request from the relevant legal authority to do so, and even then it is unlikely we would be able to see inside encrypted payloads."
For the full report visit here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/08/bittorrent_encryption_explosion/
Music Biz Sues Robertson Again
The Register's Andrew Orlowski reports:
MP3.com founder Michael Robertson is on the receiving end of another lawsuit - from EMI - this time against his MP3tunes.com and Sideload.com services.
Robertson told Reuters it was retaliation for a suit his Sideload.com service had filed against EMI in September.
MP3Tunes is a service that enables the user to back up their music collection and access it anywhere. Multiple concurrent access is prohibited - so it's hard to imagine how it could be construed as infringing copyright. In fact, it's just the sort of service recording sound owners should be offering as a value-add to physical offerings.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/12/emi_sues_sideload/
Leopard's Preview: Can You Throw Away Your Copy of Acrobat Yet?
IT-Enquirer's Erik Vlietinck reports:
Leopard's Preview is blazingly fast. It's actually faster than Tiger's Preview, and that one launched documents and images far quicker than any Adobe application. The reason is that Adobe must load all those libraries and modules in order to deliver the power and capabilities they think you may need. Preview, on the other hand, was designed to be a simple viewer of images and PDFs. In Tiger, at least. In Leopard, Preview itself gets muscle that you were used to see in Acrobat, but nowhere else. Adding comments, high-lighting, pages and bookmarks, you can do it with Preview.
The first thing that you'll notice about Preview in Leopard is that it is very fast. Double-click a PDF and Preview will not even bounce once for a brochure with 18 pages and heavily illustrated. The next thing you'll notice is that the integrated sidebar can be opened to reveal thumbnails of the pages, while the thumbnails themselves can be resized.
For the full report visit here:
http://www.it-enquirer.com/main/ite/more/leopard_preview/
Walter Mossberg: Macs Seldom Need Security Software
Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walter S. Mossberg says:
The Macintosh isn't inherently invulnerable to malicious software. In fact, last week it was reported that there is a new scam on the Web that can plant a malicious "Trojan Horse" program on the Mac. However, this is a rare event. There have been practically no viruses, spyware or other malicious programs written for the Macintosh that have actually spread outside the laboratory.
For that reason, most Mac users don't run security software, and security-software companies don't make much of an effort to sell it for Macs. I don't believe it is necessary, so far, for all except the most paranoid (and those who run Windows on their Macs). In fact, freedom from the burdens of running and updating security software has been one of the Mac's big advantages.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/business/210889.php
MIT Students Working On Pedal Powered Laptops
MIT Energy Initiative's Nancy Stauffer reports:
MIT students have come up with a way to recharge your laptop without plugging it in. Rather than consuming electricity, you'll be burning calories - your own.
The students designed and built an exercise bicycle that uses "pedaling power" to charge a laptop computer. As the bike's instructions note, if you have trouble "squeezing in that daily exercise," you can now "multitask with no problem - [you can] bike while you work!"
The pedal-powered laptop began as a class assignment for Course 1.102, Introduction to Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Design (spring 2007), when students were instructed to design and build a device that converts mechanical power into electrical power.
For the full report visit here:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/energy-laptop-1108.html
Apple has 'out-Linuxed' Linux with OS X Leopard
tech.blorge.com's Triston McIntyre says:
Though Apple has gladly worked with the open source community by releasing source codes to OS X, many open source purists choose different iterations of Linux as their platforms of choice; however, Apple has finally put to rest any disputes over which UNIX system reigns supreme with OS X Leopard.
Or so Information Week's Alexander Wolfe believes. Apple just release the source code for Leopard, called Darwin 9.0, in which the evidence to Leopard's superiority over other UNIX systems lies.
On Apple's Developer Connection website, the company states, ""If you like open source development, you'll love Mac OS X. This fully-conformant UNIX operating system — built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5 — bundles over a hundred of the most popular Open Source products. You can shell out with bash, tcsh, ksh, and zsh; edit your code with emacs, vim, and nano; and build your projects using gcc, make, and autoconf."
With such an extensive list of options for tweaking and customizing, just about anyone could make their own unique iterations of OS X with relative ease. Now, it won't BE OS X, because Apple would never release every piece of their valuable source code to the public, but something close could be achieved.
To read more, click here.
Ten Days With Leopard: Coolest Cat Ever
MacNewsWorld's Chris Maxcer reports:
The act of upgrading a MacBook from Tiger to Leopard was not without problems. Let's just say you should not proceed without first making a full-on backup. Once it's properly installed, however, Leopard shines. Spaces gives you a ton of extra desktop real estate, Time Machine will probably get more people to play it safe and keep constant backups, and smaller features just plain make sense.
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Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) <IMG:lnk>Latest News about Apple is known for the stability of its operating systems and its nearly seamless ability to deliver upgrades and enhancements that only rarely break existing applications.
Still, before I upgraded from Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9 to Leopard, I made a complete bootable backup copy of my MacBook's hard drive. At this point, I hadn't heard about any of Leopard's installation woes, and I almost didn't bother to take the time to create the full backup.
I'm glad I did. ...
In addition to new features, my MacBook seems to run cooler, seems to be faster, and it definitely spends less time "thinking" when the mouse turns into the dreaded spinning beach ball. I can run a dozen applications with dozens of open documents and not worry that my MacBook is going to overheat and melt into a gooey mass of plastic...
For the full report visit here:
http://www.macnewsworld.com/rsstory/60260.html
Apple Charges Fortune For Memory Upgrade
The Inquirer says:
Want 2GB for your Apple PC? Then put your hands in your pocket, pray to Saint Steve and bob's your uncle.
The Apple store is selling 2GB PC2-4200 DDR2-533 DIMMs for the Imac G5 "with built-in iSight" for a staggering $1,200. Even a paltry 512MB upgrade is $100....
Is it a typo? Nah, because the British site has the 2GB memory priced up at Ł820. That corresponds to, er, over $1,700! But at least that extra $500 means you'll get your memory in 24 hours....
To read more, click here.
PowerBook Medic: Fixing your 'Book Better than the Rest
AppleMatters' Tanner Godarzi reports:
A while ago I had the pleasure of arriving home to a PowerBook drenched in soda, that's right, soda. I was furious, as everything was sticky from top to bottom, including the keyboard. Frantically I tried to dry it out using a hair dryer and accidentally burned a few keys to a crisp, but the damage was long done before I could do anything about it. Attempts to fix this PowerBook weren't so successful; many companies only replaced LCDs or upgraded the hard drive. PowerBook Medic, on the other hand, does everything.
I was surprised that the only repairs offered by retailers were CD/DVD drive upgrades, LCD repairs, and hard drive upgrades. The only alternative is buying the parts separately, albeit cheaper, and performing the repair yourself. PowerBook Medic, however, incorporates both a wide selection of 'Book parts and experienced technicians.
To read more, click here.
Are Google, Apple Draining Brains From Space Tech?
Wired's John Borland says:
The New York Times on Sunday published a fascinating and horrifying look at the mismanagement and failure of an important, but badly ill-conceived U.S. spy satellite program.
The story raises eyebrows on many levels. The particular project was doomed from the start, some of the article's sources argue; but problems are systematic, not just limited to one badly managed program....
From the article:
Today, space technology has lost its luster for young engineers, who are drawn increasingly to companies like Google and Apple. Defense experts say the entire acquisition system for space-based imagery technologies is in danger of breaking down. And the nation, at least for now, has been left without advanced new systems to replace a dwindling number of reconnaissance satellites first designed in the 1970s and updated in the 1990s.
For the full report visit here:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/11/are-google-appl.html
Charles W. Moore
