One security researcher discovered the password protecting the microcontroller in MacBook batteries is not unique for every notebook and is easily hackable. It could brick your battery, or worse, install malware that’s nearly impossible for the average person to scrub. More
TyFoN writes “Year to year, the iPad market share is down from 94.3 percent to 61.3 percent while Android is up about the same, going from 2.9 percent to 30.1 percent in the same period. 'Some 4.6 million Android-based tablets shipped in this year's second quarter as compared with just around 100,000 in the year-ago quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. …the tablet OS market as a whole grew a whopping 331 percent in the last year and Apple grew right along with it in terms of unit shipments. Tablet makers shipped 3.5 million in the second quarter of 2010, with Apple easily leading the charge with 3.2 million iPads shipped. The number of units shipped exploded to 15.1 million in this past quarter— Apple was a bit behind the pace of that growth, but still managed to ship an impressive 9.3 million iOS-based tablets. Microsoft, meanwhile, had the third largest share of the global tablet OS market at 4.6 percent, with about 700,000 Windows 7-based tablets shipped in the recent quarter.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Android Catching Up In the Tablet Market
siliconbits writes “GE Global Research announced earlier today that it has managed to cram up to 500GB worth of data on a standard DVD-size disc, an increase in storage density of roughly 100x. What's more, the tech arm of conglomerate General Electric Company says that the storage solution will record data at the same speed as Blu-ray discs while increasing storage capacity by 25 times. The Blu-ray Disk Association says that the commonly available 12x speed Blu-ray writers have a maximum writing speed of up to 400Mbps (or 50MBps) which means that in theory, it would take just over three hours to fill that new holographic hard disk. GE has confirmed that its R&D and licensing team will be sampling the media to qualified partners that may be interested in licensing the technology.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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GE To Sample 500GB DVD-Size Discs Soon
Lion is here — and as MG summed up in just 3,000 words, it’s great.
No operating system is perfect, though. At least, not for everyone, and especially not right out of the (non-existent) box. Looking to make your Lion experience that much better, we’ve bundled together a bevy of tips and tricks that you really ought to have ready on your first trip into the new OS.
Now, something to keep in mind: these tips aren’t one-size-fits-all. Read through the list and pick out the ones that sound good, and be sure to drop a comment if you’ve got a tip of your own.
After Lion launched yesterday morning, reports started pouring in that folks who made the jump from Snow Leopard to Lion were seeing terribly sluggish performance. Then, like magic, the sluggishness disappeared.
Here’s why: Lion makes a good number of changes to the way the Spotlight search works. These changes seem to require a reindexing of your hard drive’s contents . The problem? Apple starts this reindexing immediately after Lion boots up for the first time, and it causes systems (even relatively new ones) to run like hot garbage until it’s done. Give Spotlight a few hours after install is complete to work everything out, and you’ll have a much better first impression.
Three years ago, I threw my printer in the trash. I got tired of stupid ink, and stupid drivers, and that stupid grey box taking up space on my desk. I haven’t missed it since.
Okay, fine. There’s one time I always miss it: whenever I need to print and sign a contract. Thanks to a fancy (but somewhat hidden) new feature in Lion’s Preview app, I’ll never miss my printer again.
Open up a PDF in Preview. Click the annotations button (
), then click the signature button (
), then hit “Create Signature from Built-in iSight”. Scribe your signature onto a white piece of paper, hold it up to your iSight, and bam: you’ve got a stampable version of your signature sitting in Preview. Mr. Printer, meet Mr. Trash Can.
With Lion, Apple made a fairly controversial change regarding scrolling up/down on touchpads and mice: they reversed it. Any behavior that once scrolled you up now scrolls you down, while scrolling what-was-down now takes you up the page. The idea is that you’re now moving the content, rather than the scroll bar. Mouse-scroll down, page content moves down (while the scroll bar scrolls up).
Some love it. Some hate it. Gruber says to give it a week. I say screw it — do whatever feels best to your brain. I personally think it makes sense on a trackpad, but doesn’t feel right on a mouse — unfortunately, one setting controls the direction of both. As I use a mouse more than 90% of the time, I’ve reversed the setting.
You can find the checkbox to set the scroll direction to what you’re used to under System Preferences > Trackpad > Scroll and Zoom. Look for the “Scroll Direction: natural” option.
This one’s a weird one, as it depends on whether you upgraded to Lion or bought a new system running Lion out of the box.
If you upgraded, your running apps will have the glowing dot indicators you’re used to seeing in the dock. If you’re on a new Lion system, they won’t. With Apple trying to move to a persistent state/instant start app design model, these running indicators may eventually be unnecessary. For now, though, with the vast majority of apps still being designed for Snow Leopard and earlier, the lack of dots is just really damned confusing.
You can re-enable the dots under System Preferences > Dock > Show indicator lights for open applications
Lion is new, but there’s still a good chunk of stuff that needs to be updated right out of the gate. You’ll want to update iTunes, iLife, and iWork, for example, to get all the fancy new fullscreen features out of them. Just run the Software Update app found under the Apple logo in the upper left of the screen.
Mission Control (Apple’s new all-encompassing view of everything running on your system) is awesome. So much so, in fact, that “Use Mission Control” was going to be one of the tips here, but I pulled it assuming that it’s a core enough feature that everyone will be using it anyway. Learn the gestures, and learn the keyboard hotkeys.
There’s one thing that’s a bit weird about Mission Control, though: for one reason or another, it pulls your widget dashboard in as if it’s a separate Desktop/Space, which get’s reaaaally annoying if you’re using the gestures/hotkeys to quickly switch from view to view. Who uses the dashboard so much that the standard key (F12) isn’t enough?
You can keep dashboard from appearing in Mission Control by toggling the option found under System Preferences > Mission Control > Show Dashboard As Space.
Apple’s real-time disk encryption tool, Filevault, used to suck. A lot. If one tiny little bit in your Filevault image got flipped, the entire thing would explode in your face. Bam! Data gone! It was enough for many to swear off Filevault entirely, myself included.
Well, it’s time to give Filevault another shot. Apple has completely rebuilt it — so much so, in fact, that the only thing the new version really shares with its predecessor is its name. The new full-disk-encryption based setup is super fast, super secure, and has essentially no impact on your system performance. Oh, and it won’t randomly eat all your data.
Apple teaches you how to two-finger scroll the first time you boot up Lion, but myriad other gestures go unmentioned. Some of the best multi-touch gestures:
Oh, Apple. Haven’t you learned anything from auto-correct on the iPhone?
The optional autocorrect in OS X doesn’t seem to be nearly as sensitive (or hilarious) as its iOS equivalent, but it still misfires from time-to-time. You’re a big boy (or girl) on a big boy (or girl) keyboard. You can type fine. Unless you’re constantly swapping “teh” for “the”, you can turn off autocorrect under System Preferences > Language & Text > Text > Correct spelling automatically.
Got any tips you think others should see? Drop’em in the comments.
Read More:
Nine Things You Should Do After Installing OS X Lion
Plate tectonics is the great unifying theory of geology, which makes it all the more amazing that it has only been accepted for about 50 years. If you think we’ve got it all figured out by now, a paper published this week in Science may surprise you. And you’d be wrong if you were expecting to read about some dusty rock cores. The new information comes from a much shinier source: diamonds.
Contrary to popular culture, diamonds are not formed from the metamorphosis of coal under tremendous heat and pressure. It makes for nice poetry, but it’s not true. The real story is actually a bit more interesting than that.
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More here:
Plate tectonics different on early Earth?
Everybody who went to the Star Wars Fan Movie Awards last night got a special surprise: a short “sizzle reel” showcasing the deleted scenes from the original trilogy that’ll be on this fall’s Blu-ray release. And here it is! More
Someone ought to gift these IBM researchers a better camera, because their latest General Parallel File System is a back-slapping 37 times faster than their last effort back in 2007. The rig combines ten IBM System xSeries servers with Violin Memory SSDs that hold 6.5 terabytes of metadata relating to 10 billion separate files. Every single one of those files can be analyzed and managed using policy-guided rules in under three quarters of an hour. That kind of performance might seem like overkill, but it’s only just barely in step with what IBM’s Doug Balog describes as a “rapidly growing, multi-zettabyte world.” No prizes for guessing who their top customer is likely to be. Full details in the PR after the break.
Continue reading IBM rig doesn’t look like much, scans 10 billion files in 43 minutes
IBM rig doesn’t look like much, scans 10 billion files in 43 minutes originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Jul 2011 03:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
While the Sistine Chapel is gorgeous, it’s not the only notable ceiling in the world. WebUrbanist has a great collection of stunning modern ceilings for your viewing pleasure.
View article:
15 Stunning Modern Ceilings
pic: via tonx
I started an open “jokes” thread on Google+ today, and a lot of people contributed some very funny jokes I hadn’t heard before. I thought I’d share some of them here on Boing Boing. I might post more later.
• An AT&T cell tower walks into a bar and says, “I wo…enj…blac…nin…ou……….”—Shane Sargent
• How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A fish.—Craig Glassner
• How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None, that's a hardware problem.—Dr. Elementary
• Hear the one about the programmer that got stuck in the shower?
The directions on the shampoo said “Lather, Rinse, Repeat”—Tony Gonzales
• How did the hipster burn his mouth? He started eating the pizza long before it was cool. —Mark McCorkell
• Werner Heisenberg is pulled over for speeding. When the state trooper asks “Do you have ANY idea how fast you were going?”, Heisenberg just smiles and says, “No, but I know where I was!”—Laconia Laconia
• Q. How many designers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Does it have to be a light bulb?—Joe McMahon
• Q: What do you get when you cross your grandmother with an octopus?
A: A whoooooole lot of cookies.—Jeff Deason
• What does it mean when the drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth?
The floor is level. —Karl Hakkarainen
• Q: How many screenwriters does it take to change a light bulb?
A: But the light bulb is the best part!—Brian Doom
• Two cannibals are having dinner, and one of them says to the other, “Man, I really don't like my mother-in-law.” The other sighs and says, “Well then just eat the noodles.”—Katie Mussman
• Rene Descartes walks into a bar – a sleazy woman walks up to him and says “Hey handsome, buy me a drink?” He sneers at her and says, “Madam I think not” and disappears.—Genevieve Perdue
• How many Freudians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two. One to turn the bulb and one to hold the penis–I mean ladder!—James Cash
• A woman walks in a bar in Montana, middle of nowhere. She sits down next to an old weather beaten man in a ten gallon hat, spurs, the whole nine yards. She says “Are you a real cowboy?” He pauses, tips back his hat, looks at her and says “Yep, I reckon I am”. She replies “I'm a lesbian. All day long I do nothing but think about women, from the moment I get up in the morning to the moment I fall asleep at night.” She finishes her drink and leaves. A few minutes later a husband and wife, obviously tourists, walk in and sit down next to the cowboy. The husband says “Are you a real cowboy?” He pauses, takes a sip of whiskey and replies, “Well I always thought I was but it turns out all this time I've been a lesbian.”—breck witte
•
Q: How many hipsters does it take to pay the electric bill?
A: Mom —Spyro Poulos
• How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they just redefine darkness to be the industry standard.—Andrew Bulhak
• How do you tell an extroverted physicist from an introverted physicist? An extroverted physicist looks at your shoes.—Kate Greene
• My favorite joke is about Jonestown but I had to quit telling it because the punchline was too long.—Jeremy Sullivan
• Q: How many Alzheimer's patients does it take to change a light bulb? A: To get to the other side!—Ian Ledbetter
• Did you hear about the man who cooled himself to absolute zero? He's 0K.—Michael Dyrud
• Why aren't math jokes funny in Octal? Because 7 10 11—Ranjan Bagchi
• “Hey, know any good jokes about sodium?” “Na.” —Rodrigo Jimenez
•
Knock Knock!
Who’s there?
Interrupting coefficient of Friction!
Interrupting coeffici…..
MUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Hi… I am afraid I am unable to answer my mobile phone at the moment but if you leave me a message, The News of the World will email it to me later—Dave Saunders
“G+hole” is a registered trademark of Doctor Popular.
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Jokes from the G+hole
Windows: CyberGhost VPN is a free utility that encrypts, anonymizes, and offshores your internet use when you’re using public Wi-Fi at an airport or coffee shop, or you’re worried someone on your network is running a tool like Firesheep to gather credentials. More