Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

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Dear Microsoft, I am Dumping You: "For years I have been a big fan of your company, products and people. In fact, I own Microsoft shares. And I've even been to the Microsoft Museum. Unfortunately, I am dumping you for OS X and Web 2.0."

Personal fun with technology -- Comment()
Social Machines: "There is something different about the latest tools. They are both digital, rooted in the world of electrons and bits, and fundamentally social, built to enable new kinds of interactions among people. Blogging, text messaging, photo sharing, and Web surfing from a smart phone are just the earliest examples. Almost below our mental radar, these technologies are ushering us into a world of what could be called continuous computing--continuous in the usual sense of "uninterrupted," but also in the sense that it's continuous with our lives, in all their messy, social, biographical richness."

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Fundamental discovery -- Bone fracture: "A startling discovery about the properties of human bone has been made by scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The scientists describe their results - finding a sort of "glue" in human bone - in the cover story of the August issue of the international scientific journal, Nature." [Biology News Net]

Throw an infected PC to the trash -- Comment()
Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster: "On a recent Sunday morning when Lew Tucker's Dell desktop computer was overrun by spyware and adware - stealth software that delivers intrusive advertising messages and even gathers data from the user's machine - he did not simply get rid of the offending programs. He threw out the whole computer."

Tiger is snappier than Panther -- Comment()
Last week I updated my 1 GHz PowerBook G4 to Mac OS X 10.4, also known as Tiger. At first the system was laggard, due to indexing the disks. Also, Tiger seems to require more disk space than Panther (may be due to the fact that I cleaned out some unnecessary printer drivers and fonts from Panther).

Now Tiger seems a lot snappier than Panther. Waking up from sleep is instantaneous, logging in is fast, and even OmniWeb seems to be faster.

The most suprising thing is that almost everything works all right. For example, tools like HotApp and CopyPaste are so far performing flawlessly. The only software I have had trouble with is Cisco VPN. But I did have trouble with Cisco VPN sometimes even when using Panther.