Online Home of Derek Meister
Apple has updated their website with information on their latest offering: the Mac mini. A 6.5″ x 2″ computer starting at $499.
The box will come with a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 256MB of PC2700 DDR ram, 40GB harddrive and 32MB ATI Radeon 9200.
Needless to say, expect lots of arguments and flamewars from both the PC and Mac fanatics on computer forums for the next few weeks over just how powerful this new addition to the Apple lineup will be.
ExtremeTech.com has a review of Corsair Memory’s XMS XPERT DDR Ram which has an LED display on the ram itself.
For a little retro-80s political wonk amusement, surf on over to the ifilm.com Best Viral Videos collection and play the clip of Frank Zapp on Crossfire in 1986.
Frank Zappa: “The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it’s moving America towards a fascist theocrocy. And everything that’s happened during the Reagan administration is steering us down that pipe.”
Robert Novak: “Mr. Zappa, do you … do you really think, I mean all kidding aside, in this country with the permissiveness, that we are moving towards a fascist theocracy?”
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
CNN Money has an article on the FBI’s recent statement about Tsunami relief scams that are appearing on websites and spam mail.
Normally, this would be the point where you’d expect a surprised exclamation about the fact that such a horrible event that’s resulted in more than 150,000 dead would be used so crassly and obviously to make quick money, but the truth is I doubt many of us are surprised by it happening.
It’s telling that when I checked my email in the days after the first reports started coming in I actually expected the folder where my spam filter places the unwanted email it detects to be filled with relief money request scams. Unfortunately, I wasn’t disappointed, because within twenty four hours a 419 scam mail using the disaster as it’s base showed up.
I have to admit that I’m impressed with the Azureus bittorrent client software. While conventional wisdom says that anything written in Java will be slow and unstable, Azureus runs very well.
With the latest Java run-time installed, I’ve had the client open for days at a time without a single crash and my system is still responsive. The memory footprint is obviously larger than similar torrent clients, but the amount of features and plugins available for Azureus make it a personal favorite. The other advantage of being programmed in Java, of course, is the fact that the same software can be run from my Windows XP Professional machine as on my Ubuntu Linux workstation.