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Apple wins

Apple

It seems that Apple has been granted the right to search and destroy the sources of ThinkSecret’s information… and correct me if I’m wrong, but the case against ThinkSecret itself is different – Apple filed a separate suit against ThinkSecret alleging that they induced Apple employees to steal trade secrets. Dunno about you, but to me, thats just a convenient, valid legal excuse to sue the publisher.

Two of my favorite “read lines” with regards to the whole Apple charade.

There’s another old saying in my profession: The mission of journalists is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

A letter to Steve Jobs by Mike Langberg of San Jose Mercury News.

and…

Saying that no one has the right to publish information that could have been provided only by someone breaking the law, judge James Kleinberg ruled that online reporters for Apple Insider and PowerPage must reveal their sources.

via Linuxwrangler Read More

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If The New York Times Jumped Off a Bridge

If The New York Times Jumped Off a Bridge

On the fallacious argument that Apple wouldn’t be suing The New York Times if they had published what ThinkSecret did.

via Daring Fireball

A excellent read, but still not convincing enough – though I must admit, he makes a lot of sense. I especially agree about the New York Times analogy being moot, as there was no actual experience to base anything on.

But on the contrary, how is he so sure that Apple will sue said NY Times if it should publish? I mean since he already went hypothetical in the first place that Apple would have more reason to sue. Notice that even that hypothetical situation should also be moot – since, as he himself said, the NY Times isn’t that sort of publication. I guess my point is never try to disprove anything hypothetical with anything similarly hypothetical.

Anyways, that’s all I have to say about that article… end train of thought… period.

But since I’ve gone this far… might as well speak my mind about the issue.

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Extensis Suitcase X1

X1

I was messing with my font collection so I could check out Extensis’ Suitcase X1 (pronounced “eleven”). I ended up moving so much fonts around that I wanted to start from scratch.

Stupid me, I even deleted fonts from my /System/Library/Fonts folder. But not because I had a death wish. I already had copied the said fonts somewhere and just wanted to do some sort of a “clean install” of them.

The bad part was I couldn’t copy the fonts back. Permission errors abound (which weren’t really permission related) Suddenly my menubar acted weird, apps started crashing (probably because they couldn’t render the system fonts (because they were erased).

I had no choice but to reboot… but on reboot, I couldn’t get into any GUI… I was thrown into the Darwin commandline. Sweat proceeded to pour down my forehead as I was thinking that I may just end up like Joel and his Archive and Install adventure… which I didn’t have time for. Read More

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More covert technology

The 2005 Powerbooks have an accelerometer chip to take measurements of the laptops’ motion (e.g. during falls, etc.)

Bubblegym 0.1

This is a tilt-sensitive game which uses the accelerometer in the new Powerbooks!

via Joel’s blog

The real purpose of said chip is:

Apple’s PowerBook laptops now have a little accelerometer inside that’s used to protect the hard drive if you drop it (it notices the sudden speed increase and parks the drive heads).

However, is it just me, or can that chip also be a safety precaution for Apple – so that people can’t just claim warranties left and right. Sorta like the black boxes of aircrafts… to determine wether it was “mechanical problems” or “pilot error” hehehehe.

But then again, you can disable it if you wanted to:

$ pmset -g Active Profiles: Battery Power 1* AC Power 3 Currently in use: acwake 0 … ams 1 $ sudo pmset -a ams 0 $ pmset -g … ams 0

So I guess it’s a cool safe thing to have after all!