Greg In The Desert

• Police: Argument over better father ends in shooting – A man shot his former lover's new boyfriend in the leg early Saturday morning after the two men argued about who was a better father to the first man's son, police said.
• Home invasion suspects tied to border group – KVOA News 4, Tucson, Arizona - – The trio are alleged to have dressed as law enforcement officers and forced their way into a home about 10 miles north of the Mexican border in rural Arivaca on May 30, wounding a woman and fatally shooting her husband and their 9-year-old daughter.

  Their motive was financial, Dupnik said.

  "The husband who was murdered has a history of being involved in narcotics and there was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location as well as the possibility of drugs," Dupnik said.

  Forde is the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a small border watch group, and Bush goes by the nickname "Gunny" and is its operations director, according to the group's Web site.

• News : Intel fined for hazardous waste – The New Mexico Environment Department fined Intel for violating the state’s hazardous waste management regulations in March.

  On March 25, NMED conducted a hazardous waste compliance evaluation inspection at Intel Corporation. Inspectors discovered that Intel failed to close several containers of universal waste lamps. Universal waste lamps are bulbs used for standard office lighting and can contain levels of mercury and lead that make them hazardous waste when disposed.

• Growing the Poison Pepper – Boing Boing – I ordered naga jolokia pepper seeds from the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University. The naga jolokia, sometimes called the bhut jolokia, the ghost pepper, or the poison pepper, is the world's hottest chile pepper. My brother, the expert gardener, is growing them right now. These are pretty difficult to grow in Minnesota; they take forever to germinate and the drop flowers at the slightest provocation.
• Bare-bones warning to Boulder cyclists – The Denver Post – Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner warned Thursday that police will ticket bike riders if they expose their genitals during the World Naked Bike Ride, which is planned for Saturday as a protest against oil dependency.
• Not so windy: Research suggests winds dying down – The Denver Post – The wind, a favorite power source of the green energy movement, seems to be dying down across the United States. And the cause, ironically, may be global warming—the very problem wind power seeks to address.
  The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East.
• Four Reasons Why iPhone Owners Hate AT&T – With the iPhone 3G S news now in the wild, the discussion digressed from the announcement of the 3G S itself to AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive carrier in the U.S. (at the moment). Without a doubt, this relationship is where Apple's weaknesses lie.
• Three Things the Palm Pre Does Better Than the iPhone 3GS | Popular Science – Arguably the Pre’s biggest draw is its super-elegant multitasking schema—apps fill up “cards” as they’re launched, which you can quickly scroll through horizontally by pressing the main button, which zooms out into a “card”view. Closing apps is done by flicking it off the top of the screen, which feels great. Aside from the five icons in a quick-launch bar and those within the three drawers of the app launcher, there is no icons-on-a-desktop conceit.
• Al Jazeera English – Europe – WHO declares H1N1 pandemic – The World Health Organisation has declared a H1N1 pandemic, the first such annoucement in more than 40 years, as infections continue to rise around the planet.
• Atomic Warfare – Intel last week bought for $884 million Wind River Systems, a venerable embedded operating system company — yet another of the chip giant’s recent forays into software. The reason for this purchase is both simple and grand — to help Intel vertically integrate and to further its Linux ambitions. Intel’s ultimate target with this purchase is Microsoft. It’s all about kicking Redmond out of the netbook business.

The threshold for developing iPhone applications is low. Although the play concept of AppleCatch is good, the graphics look like they were made in Microsoft Paint.

AppleCatch was previously a paid application and is now free.

I’ve known for a while that Intel won’t be deploying Microsoft Vista internally. Now that the New York Times is reporting on it, you can know too.

Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.

The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.

An Intel spokesman said the company was testing and deploying Vista in certain departments, but not across the company.

I’ve got a pretty good reputation on being on top of the latest technology. I’m usually considered a early adopter. I spent $1000 on a DVD player back in the mid nineties (which by the way that Sony 5 Disc player still works). Yet I don’t have a iPhone, I don’t like ebook readers and here I am about to say why I don’t recommend HD discs of either flavor. Perhaps I’m getting older and smarter, perhaps technology sucks more than it used to.

Movie studio fragmentation is the problem with Blu-ray and HD DVD formats. Half the studios are on one format and the other half are on the other format. You need a Blu-ray player to see Spiderman, you need a HD DVD player to see Transformers. Thus, I haven’t purchased either and haven’t recommended either. The situation is improving and it looks like one format could be a winner.

Up until last week a 60% of the studios made Blu-ray discs, now Warner has announced it is switching to Blu-ray and it looks like Paramount may be making the switch as well. This just leaves Universal and a few small studios to make HD DVD disc.

I still say wait and see until one or the other format is declared dead by the sponsoring forums. Microsoft is a backer of HD DVD, for example, and won’t let it die so easily.

I get this error when trying to install any Apple application on my Windows XP machine at work: “The older version of apple software update cannot be removed”. Apple’s Software Update program will not auto update itself and iTunes will not uninstall.

The solution is to download the Windows Install Cleanup program from Microsoft. I had to remove Apple Software Update, Itunes and Quicktime. Since I don’t use iTunes on my Windows machine, I didn’t worry about backing it up. But if i did use it, would have backed it up.

I went back and reinstalled all the Apple programs without any problems

Microsoft has recalled Halo 2 for Microsoft Vista due to “nudity”. Don’t get too excited. A Bungie programmer left a funny error message that shows someone mooning.

Not the kind of nudity I was hoping for but funny still. Image via Shiny Shiny.

The FBI still has their “mega contract” with Microsoft. They have infinite Microsoft resources to help them figure out how to get to your stuff if you’ve used a Microsoft encryption solution.

The FBI has particular trouble with Apple’s Filevault encryption if the passphrase is of “excellent” quality. That tells me they have thousands of monkeys doing brute-force attempts on filevault sparseimage files. Interesting.

FBI: Encryption Really Pisses Us Off.

MacNN: Apple’s 30% sales growth outpaces HP, Dell. Resitance is futile…

Sales of Macs largely kept pace with significant growth in overall PC shipments during the first quarter of 2007, two market research firms concur, yielding Apple the title of fastest growing manufacturer with regard to U.S. computer sales. Both Gartner and IDC issued statements today indicating that while the shipment of Microsoft’s Windows Vista was help drive increased PC sales in the first quarter of 2007, Apple was able to match the market with stronger portable sales and an increase in units moved through retail channels, despite stagnant Mac growth predictions from Gartner earlier this year.

Mac OS X, which has like a 100% more users than Windows Vista (because it’s not out yet), has less viruses than Windows Vista. Ok, there is some example code that show how to write viruses for the new OS so I guess it’s not a real virus yet.

A virus writer has published the first examples of malicious code that targets Microsoft’s upcoming command-line shell, code-named Monad, according to Finnish antivirus maker F-Secure. If the technology is included in Windows Vista, these could be one of the first viruses to target the new operating system formerly known as Longhorn, F-Secure said Thursday.

How convenient that this came from a company that makes antivirus software? The same thing happened a while back whenn Intego ran around saying it had found a Mac OS X virus. Nothing ever came of that either. You have to consider the source. I have no doubt that considerable effort will be put into virus in Vista however.

I want to mention that Apple never used the My Whatever for folder names. So now Windows will, again, adopt another Macintosh way of doing things.

Ending a longstanding tradition, Microsoft Corp. plans to stop using the word “my” as the default prefix for such folders as “My Documents,” “My Music,” “My Pictures” and others along those lines. Starting in the next Windows version, due out next year, folders will be known simply as “Documents,” “Music,” and so on.