North Coast Online

Apple Goes After The Heathens

I read today that Apple has launched a Web browser for Windows and my interest was piqued.  I've been sorely tempted to defect to the Apple camp many times over the years, but have stuck with Windows because of my previous employment as a Windows software developer and the sad fact that Apple has never allowed anyone the opportunity to become an independent Apple software developer. 

Nonetheless, I downloaded a copy of Safari to see what Apple software looks like on a PC and I've got to say that it's pretty good.  The browser is still in beta and so there are still mucho bugs, but it is obviously very fast.  I can't use it to blog, though, because the Typepad posting screen doesn't display properly.   Apple has provided a helpful bug-reporting icon which I duly used and I look forward to improved versions to come.

Dropping the barriers between PC's and Apples can only be a good thing.

Youtube World

Kos advises his adoring readers to record everything they do.

 

Every appearance by a top Republican official or candidate should be recorded. Every one of them.

 

All it takes is one "Macaca" incident to transform a race or create one where one didn't exist. As the Montana incident blogged earlier today showed, a video can knock out prospective candidates before they even enter.

 

And this is no longer about finding one big blunder to put on a campaign commercial. It's about using video and (free) technologies like YouTube to build narratives about opponents, using their own words, at their own events.

Who, on the left or the right, could disagree?  Of course, leftists, most of whom don't work -- or if they do, work for the government which is about the same thing -- will have much more time for this.  But the stray conservative will be out there, too, and that can only be a good thing.

For years we've been treated to repeated media examples of Ronald Reagan's, Dan Quayle's, George H.W. Bush's and certainly GWB's malapropisms, missteps and verbal blunders.  It all served, of course, to cement the left-wing zeitgeist that conservatives are bumbling fools.  But now, in the age of Youtube, we can highlight the Democrats' mistakes, too.

Rush Limbaugh has been doing it for years, but of course it never broke into the mainstream media.  My favorite has always been the clip of Al Gore and Bill Clinton touring Monticello when Al Gore asked the docent whom a particular bust represented.  Rather flustered, the tourguide responded, "Um, that's George Washington."  This should all be great fun.

Finally!

Via the Instapundit I find out that flying cars are just around the corner.  It turns out that NASA's been working on them but is holding back its announcement until that pesky problem of keeping us from hitting trees, your neighbor's house, power lines and each other's flying car is solved.  In the meantime, though, good old Yankee ingenuity is at work.

Paul Moller has developed his own flying car and is working hard to get it into production.

The current model is a cherry-red coupe that looks as though it should be dogfighting TIE fighters outside the Death Star. The futuristic Skycar has four seats (carrying up to 750 lbs.), a maximum air speed of 350 mph, and a range of about 750 mi. In theory, it gets more than 25 mpg. On the ground, the Skycar should travel a dinky 30 to 35 mph, just fast enough to get to an empty parking lot and stun everyone with a sweet vertical takeoff.

Oh, and wouldn't that be sweet, indeed.

Free Wi-Fi No Bargain?

Does Mayor Brown really want to subject Buffalonians to this?

I Want My Flying Car!

Since I was a little boy in the early 60's, I've been promised flying cars.  And dammit, here I am in 2007 and I'm still driving a f*****g Ford pickup just like Dad was in 1953 (albeit his didn't have a cassette player.)  So, when I see video, like this one, I know I'm just setting myself up for more disappointment -- it is tantalizing though.

I have to say that the wings, when folded up, don't exactly scream Acura, but you have to make some allowances for the ability to actually fly to work in Tonawanda each morning.  Just imagine avoiding that traffic-crush at Symphony Circle each day.    

I Won't Uninstall It But . . .

OK, I admit it.  I'm a Microsoft schmuck, a lay-down, a patsy.  I first touched a Microsoft product in 1983 when I got my hands on an IBM-PC XT running PC-DOS. And over the years I became the DOS master.  Eventually, and only under duress, I made the transition to Windows, learned to love it and actually made my living programming applications for it throughout the late 90's.  I still hold a soft spot in my heart for ol' Bill Gates's creations.

But today I gave up on Internet Explorer 7.   When Microsoft finally implemented Firefox's tabbed interface, I downloaded it in a heartbeat but, alas, it isn't quite there.  I could put up with its inability to properly render a page at smaller and smaller resolutions and it wasn't a huge deal that when you switch to another tab and then return to the original, it was likely garbled gibberish that required a refresh.  That's just a button-click after all.

But its proclivity to freeze up every, oh I don't know, 2 minutes, has done me in.  Yes, if you open another copy of IE7 and switch your focus to it, the frozen copy will likely start up again.  And yes, occasionally you need to open another copy, load a site, hit 'Refresh' and then -- and only then -- will the recalcitrant "spawn" come back to life.

But it's all just become too much of a pain to live with and so I've sheepishly returned home to Firefox.  Microsoft should know better.  What the hell are they thinking when they roll out new stuff full of bugs? I bought a brand new Toshiba laptop last month and it's working beautifully -- I love it.  And I'm just thankful for one thing -- it didn't come loaded with Vista.  I can't imagine what fresh hell its users are suffering through.

Show Me The Paper

New York's foot-dragging in approving a new voting system has had at least one unintended consequence -- and this time it's a good one.  We've been able to watch what's worked and what hasn't in other states.  For example, Florida jumped on the electronic voting bandwagon early and is now scrambling to get back off.

During the chad-hanging agony of Florida's 2000 presidential election, it would have been hard to imagine a politician appearing before a crowd and promising more manual recounts - and getting applause.

But after six years and a contentious experiment with paperless electronic voting in much of the state, Democratic U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler last week made hand recounts sound as appealing as low-cost prescription drugs when he spoke to a senior-dominated audience west of Delray Beach.

"Florida law wisely says, in a close election, the people deserve a manual recount," Wexler declared.

He then introduced Gov. Charlie Crist, who wants legislators to approve $32.5 million to end paperless voting in Florida. The Republican governor got wild applause from the Democrat-dominated audience as he, too, called for a return to paper ballots and the prospect of more recounts.

"We need to be able to find out, if there is a question about a vote, that there's a ballot to recount," Crist said.

There are obviously problems with paper-based voting systems, too, but well-designed rules defining a properly-cast vote can overcome most of those.  There's still nothing like a good-old stack of reassuring paper to fall back on, though, when the outcome of an election is disputed.  New York can still benefit from Florida's (and Ohio's and North Carolina's and . . .) mistake, if only for once we'll pay attention.

The Key To A Stolen Election

More e-voting shenanigans.

Imagine if all it took to get inside widely-used Diebold electronic voting machines--perhaps with malicious intentions, such as installing tally-altering software on its memory card--was a photograph of the key to the system's physical lock.

Thanks to a little help from the e-voting outfit itself, it may actually be that simple, a security researcher from Princeton University suggested this week.

According to J. Alex Halderman, a computer science PhD student, a picture of the key published at Diebold's online store was a veritable blueprint for filing down ordinary hardware-store cabinet keys to an identical shape.

Ross Kinard of the site SploitCast, which calls itself "the podcast for hackers, geeks, and the security paranoid," alerted Halderman to the vulnerability. Kinard recently mailed three of his homemade keys to Halderman, who then successfully used them to unlock a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine.

Paper ballots, anyone?  New York shouldn't even consider spending our money on computerized voting equipment.  It isn't necessary and it isn't secure.  That should end the discussion.

Internet Explorer 7 Update

Dissecting Leftism hears from a reader who had much the same experience I did after downloading IE7.

After being prompted by my computer to download and install the latest Windows update, it asked me to also upgrade my browser to IE7 (I was using IE6).I like to use IE most of the time because I run so many websites, and I like to see them through the same viewer as the majority of the population. So I decided to go ahead and update IE. After it finished, I was no longer able to launch an IE browser. In fact, any time I attempted to, it froze my entire computer. I even tried right clicking the IE icon on my desktop, so I could check on the settings and THAT made my computer freeze too. At first I thought it killed my internet connection, but fortunately I was able to connect using Mozila FireFox so I could do a quick search. What I discovered was that hundreds (probably thousands) of people have posted similar problems in the past week, meaning it is likely affecting MILLIONS of people. I simply did a Windows System Restore to yesterday's restore point, and all is good again. If you haven't updated to IE7 yet, I would suggest waiting for a few months and making sure the general word on the street is a "go" before trying it.

Yes! I inexplicably forgot to mention that after downloading IE7, my computer, upon rebooting, would bring up Windows XP with nothing but the landscape:  no icons and no menus.  I, too, had to reboot in "safe mode" and specify "last known safe settings."  That did take care of the problem, but I'm not so sure that the majority of Windows users would know to try it.

I was perilously close to losing everything and reinstalling the original software disk.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

Internet Explorer 7

Just an aside.  If you're hankering to download Internet Explorer 7.0, just lie down for a couple minutes and get over it.  I got it last week only after removing an old and seemingly unused program completely screwed up my Internet connection settings.

I decided that as long as I had to reload Explorer anyway I might as well go for the new one.

It's not horrible.  It contains the tabbed interface we've come to like in Firefox but there are annoying display problems.  At certain zoom settings, hyperlinks don't line up with the text, the cursor tends to disappear in editing boxes (always annoying for a blogger) and I'm sure someone will soon inform me that Vladimir Putin now has free access to the contents of my hard drive.

It'll get there, I'm sure.  It's not bad enough that I'd scrap it and go back to 6, but it's not there yet.