I am more and more glad I started avoiding high fructose corn syrup because it tastes icky years ago…
Child diabetes blamed on food sweetener (London Times)
This has disturbing ramifications for most American children, really disturbing.
Hat tip to Waldo Jaquith for the link.
The mainstream media needs to find a new adjective to describe Joe Lieberman, for you cannot be called independent when you are a wholly owned pawn of the insurance industry. Just because he was rejected by the Democratic Party of his own state, and is therefore not in either of the two main parties; that does not make him independent. It makes him a “reject”, or perhaps a “former Democrat.” In truth he is just a corporate shill, but that involves more brains than the media typically shows, so “bi-partisan reject” is the most appropriate.
Independent should be reserved for those who really are independent.
There are many false rumors in the world, and I cannot address very many of them, but I have direct experience with two devices that people have all sorts of false conceptions about; and I can share my experience with each…
iPhone 3G: mine is over a year old now (September or October 2008) and I routinely get about 54 hours out of a battery charge with mixed standby, cell phone calls, and moderate data use during that 54 hour period. Everyone said that having batteries I could not change myself would be a problem. They are wrong, the batteries are fine. The other FUD that people keep saying about the iPhone is that it is not multi-tasking; well, I frequently look things up online while on a call. I check other people’s addresses and phone numbers in my contacts list while on a call when the caller asks for it. I check my calendar while on a call to verify an appointment. I think that is pretty effective multi-tasking. The iPhone is not the end-all, be-all device; I still carry around a Palm Tungsten C for long note taking on the go (the iPhone needs an optional, occasional use folding bluetooth keyboard), but it is surprisingly good as a camera and phone, and pretty decent as an ultra-portable network aware computer. AT&T does not really suck that much, at least not when compared to the other mobile carriers… which pretty much all suck… So AT&T is neither far better nor far worse than the pack of nasty nickel and dimer slime we all have to deal with; though perhaps they are less slimy than Verizon (as is everyone else).
MacBook Air: mine is a first generation model, purchased in March 2008 and heavily used (some might even say brutally used) every day since. It has been dropped twice on hard flooring from about 4 feet once while open and running, once while closed and in sleep mode; both times it got minor dings but kept running. I routinely get 4-5 hours of battery life through heavy office work (heavy in the sense that there are 6-15 apps running, but all are office automation and communication, none are rendering nor graphics design applications). The solid state drive is small at only 55GB as seen by 10.5’s filesystem, but latency is extraordinarily fast (about the same as RAM from the 1980s). Bandwidth is no better than a standard drive; and perhaps a little slower, but it is fast enough to watch HD full screen action content streamed from the drive. I do not miss lugging around a rarely used optical drive, and simply plug in a 3rd party USB drive the rare time I need to load software from DVD/CD. The one thing this machine needs is a security port to attach a security cable; because there is no attachment point at all, I am forced to carry this thing around more than I like or lock it in a drawer. The FUD I keep hearing is that the battery will no last long, and that it will need to be replaced all the time. My experience is the opposite; I am still on the original battery and it lasts 4-5 hours of heavy use from a nearly full charge.
These products are not for everyone; but the FUD about battery life (both per charge and overall) needed to be debunked. I am very grateful that these devices continue to make life easier and information more accessible to me.
Three Edged Sword, a fan fiction audio drama based on Babylon 5, has been making my daily commute seem much shorter. If you like Babylon 5 and enjoy a decent audio drama, it is available free as a podcast from Voices of Babylon.
Erci and I continued to have a lot of fun on our recent vacation to Seattle, Portland, and Cupertino.
Portland details after the jump…
Continue reading ›
Erci and I had a lot of fun on our recent vacation to Seattle, Portland, and Cupertino.
Seattle details after the jump…
Continue reading ›
Now, do something fun with your loved ones, like visit a park, museum, or just stay home and talk to each other.
LJ and WordPress.com bloggers should be happy with their blogging service right now – for those excellent hosted services are hiding one of the longest steady comment spam attacks I’ve seen from you and your readers. Thank them (your hosted blog service provider), for this is annoying at the service level.
My personal WordPress blog (the one I host) has Akismet to filter the likely spam from the real comments; and it is working… but the scope of this 11 days and running long attack is mind boggling. IP address ranges of mostly hacked PCs indicate that the bot-net spreading the comment spam circles the globe and is sophisticated enough to vary the attack from each hacked PC suck that the obvious triggers are not caught by the anti-spam firewalls. This indicates to me that there are a LOT of Windows based PCs that are doing far more than their owners want them to do.
It also raises liability questions. I used to think that if you were the unwitting victim of an attack, and while hacked your PC did something illegal, you should not be held accountable. I am not sure anymore and begin to question if everyone who puts a machine on the net does not have some obligation to prevent it’s being used illegally. Statistically, most of the hacked PCs have had no steps taken to secure them at all. Is that not a little frightening?
The product this attack is pushing are black market brand name drugs; and the language of the hook text in the spam is so poorly constructed that I suspect it’s all from Eastern European programmers being paid by organized crime syndicates. Hopefully the crime lords have to pay by the comment injected wether it actually gets published on our blogs or not; for at least then some programmer is getting paid and sucking the money out of the criminal’s hands.
It does also make me wonder how much of a markup the drug companies are charging for legal drugs; this method of marketing is hideously inefficient – but they must be getting a return on their “investment” which implies the margins are staggering.
Sorry Apple, I am disgusted that a device I bought and paid for forces upgrades that I do not want.
This is the third time an upgrade has been applied automatically before I allowed it, before I was ready, and before the software that I added has been ready for the new version.
I paid for the device, I should get to decide. Period.
History of upgrades that I did NOT agree to:
Frankly, this is exactly the crappy treatment we got from Microsoft and DISH network over our original DISHplayer 7200; it worked great for years then the relationship between the two companies soured and Microsoft started force feeding our DISHplayer upgrades we did not want; it became less and less stable as a DVR until we were forced off the device out of sheer disgust. DISH ended up giving us a free “upgrade” to a DishDVR 508 which did not have the same features (at the time) but was way more stable.
Perhaps I can get Apple to give me a free Mini to replace the broken and unstable AppleTV?
Update: a day later and I have cooled off enough to download the newest Apple TV firmware (3.01 is 2Z694-6004-003.dmg), and use that with ATVUSB-Creator (v1.0b10) to update my USB memory stick with new “patch stick” software. I bounced my Apple TV with the USB stick, which re-installs ssh, then bounced my Apple TV again.
Scouting several forums revealed that there is a new XBMC Launcher (3.2 beta3):
wget http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/858897/XBMC/Launcher-3.2.beta3-debug.run scp Launcher-3.2.beta3-debug.run frontrow@appletv.local:/Users/frontrow rm Launcher-3.2.beta3-debug.run ssh frontrow@appletv.local chmod +x Launcher-3.2.beta3-debug.run ; ./Launcher-3.2.beta3-debug.run
Then I used the new Launcher (now visible on Apple TV menus) to update to the latest versions of Boxee (aplha 0.9.14.6992) and XBMC (9.11 alpha). That gets XBMC and Boxee working again.
I still need to test Couchsurfer and see how to lock out the upgrade script.
I am not a fan of Mike Arrington; his babble in TechCrunch is often wrong; but he is doing investigative journalism here and digging to find out more details about why playing games on Facebook and MySpace can be hazardous. That the NY Times failed to even mention that there are serious concerns in their followup article is embarrassing at the least, and possibly shows that they are pwned by the advertisers and not representing the best interests of the public on this subject.
If you are on MySpace and Facebook; you’d best be VERY careful about the applications you use.
If you are wondering why mainstream media is dying, Fake Steve poses a credible argument: because they’ve abdicated their responsibilities as the 4th estate.
Check out Fake Steve Jobs’ Article for yourself; it is a fun read. Blogs are often a better source of news than newspapers.
