Happy 25th Birthday, Mac. Now Isn’t It About Time You Settled Down? [Apple]

Apple’s Mac line celebrates its 25th birthday today: the original Macintosh was released back on January 24th, 1984. It’s been a bumpy road, but it made it. And we’re glad.

The first Macintosh, now usually called the Macintosh 128k, was an inauspicious beginning for one of the most exciting companies in the industry. It was expensive and underpowered for the time, and its novel mouse-driven interface was unpopular with techies. But the Mac is a survivor, developing and changing through the years, taking the first dip into the water of portability and later making waves with innovative design and remarkable success while other lines have folded or moved on to other ventures.

Back in the day, Steve Jobs was just as much a showman as he’s been in the years since. He’s half nerd and half P.T. Barnum. Here’s the event at which he first unveiled the Macintosh.

Even if you’re not a Mac user, and I’m not, the Mac has inarguably helped the industry as a whole. Personal computing wouldn’t be where it is without it. So go wild, commenters. Reminisce. And wish the Mac a happy birthday. [AppleInsider]

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The Biggest Advances in Governmental Tech During the Bush Era [Bush League]

With all this talk about Obama’s BlackBerry and weekly YouTube addresses, we tend to assume there was no governmental tech before him. But there actually were some impressive advances in the last eight years.

Among the many online weather and emergency alert services, job listings, and the like, the Bush years also found a few more interesting new tools. The Library of Congress began posting photos of their incredible catalog on Flickr, for example, and the FBI created widgets for locating sexual predators and most wanted criminals. New tools for college students helped them find loans and compare schools, and finally we were able to pay taxes online. Diplomatic and Intelligence agencies jumped on the Wikipedia bandwagon with Diplopedia and Intellipedia, respectively.

Sure, it’s not free broadband internet for all, but let’s give credit where credit’s due. That Flickr page is amazing! [Nick Thompson via Wired]

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Windows 7 Beta Downloads Available Through Feb. 10 [Windows 7]

Even though the Windows Team said they were removing the download cap on Windows 7 until Jan. 24, they didn’t mean downloads would end on Jan. 24. Windows 7 will be available through Feb. 10.

You have to start downloading Windows 7 before Feb. 10, but you have until Feb. 12 to finish it, and product keys will be available after Feb. 12, though they don’t say for how long after. Which essentially means you now have all the time in the world to install Windows 7. You can download it from Microsoft now and get a key way later, or, from the way it sounds, you could even grab a torrent after Microsoft stops offering downloads and then still get a key from them.

So yeah, it really is kind of like a free upgrade, at least until it self-destructs on Aug. 1. [Windows Team]

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Jolicloud: the OS your netbook has been screaming for

See that? That’s what could be on your netbook later this year. Out of nowhere, one Tariq Krim has crafted the Jolicloud operating system, which is an OS designed specifically for those miniaturized laptops that rely on underpowered CPUs and less RAM than any PC should be booted up with. In essence, Jolicloud is a modified flavor of Linux that promises faster boot times than other alternatives, and judging by the shot above, it’s pretty heavily reliant on icon-based navigation. Hit the read link to keep tabs on its release date.

[Via Engadget German]

Filed under: Laptops

Jolicloud: the OS your netbook has been screaming for originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 25 Jan 2009 03:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Win 7 Tip: Maximize and Dock Your Windows by Dragging to the Screen Edge [Windows 7]

One of the minor, more handy features of Windows 7 is a new way to resize windows by just dragging them to the edge of the screen in a gesture-based action.

If you drag your window to the top of the screen, it will maximize and fill the space completely. If you drag it to the left or right edge, it will dock it to that side and take up roughly 60% of the horizontal space (notice the silhouettes of the larger windows). Drag it back down or over in the other direction and it returns to its previous size.

It’s especially helpful when you’re working on computers with small screens and trackpads, where it can be a hassle to get your cursor over that tiny button to maximize or restore to normal size. Instead of a small space to aim for, you at least have the whole upper bar to work with.

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Red Tape, Greed Blocking Widespread U.S. Cell Phone Credit Card Transactions [Cell Phones]

In Japan, paying for things with a wave of a cell phone is old hat. Clothing, food, movies, loose women—you name it, they’ve bought it using a phone. Americans? Not so much. Here’s why.

The short answer is “red tape.” There are simply far too many entities, players, middlemen and suits that each want a piece of the pie to make such a system practical in the U.S., for now. Indeed, popular and proven programs already exist in some major cities, like Atlanta, New York and San Francisco, but the effect has yet to grow into anything we could seriously call “critical mass.”

In Japan however, the New York Times reports that the major players simply said, “this is how it will be” in the early stages, and moved on from there. The result is that a single carrier, NTT DoCoMo, accounted for more than half of the Japanese market from the moment of inception. Their leverage as the majority player “motivated” the system to take off among the financial institutions and handset manufacturers, but I have a hard time believing such practices, anathema to U.S. capitalism, would ever take hold Stateside.

Still, the same technology driving drive-by Japanese cell phone purchases in Akihabara is still managing to leak into other countries, albeit in different form factors. In London, for example, the Times reports that “Oyster” cards used for transportation feature the same Near Field Communication (NFC) short-range tech as Japanese phones. In the U.S., MasterCard’s PayPass terminals allow consumers to wave their card instead of swipe it.

But these outlets only allow on CC# per card. Japanese phones, the nirvana of drive-by transactions, allow users to select from several accounts, and use the one they want.

The obvious fraud and theft issue is also addressed in the article (”safe” say experts), although with all the big time ID theft stories we’ve seen this past year the stigma will remain regardless of how many Kevin Fu’s there are saying cell phone transactions are A-OK.

Fu is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His claim to fame is discovering a huge security hole in PayPass-type credit card transactions in 2006. His research led card companies to overhaul the system and institute fixes over the past three years.

One upside of this discussion (if you’re in the pro-cell phone CC camp) is that MasterCard has already come out and said there will be no additional fees for these transactions, should they see a massive deployment. Of course, we’re in the middle of a huge global recession right now, so we’ll see if the credit card industry, often criticized as synonymous with the phrase “hidden fees and finance charges” will keep their promise.

If you’re a betting person, the magic date for cell phone credit card transactions is 2012, when Key Pousttchi, head of the Wi-mobile research group at the University of Augsburg in Germany, says NFC tech will be in pretty much every cell phone on the market (and netbooks? Or will they have converged with cell phone by then? The article doesn’t say).

Now, call me a Luddite traditionalist all you want, but I still don’t mind reaching for my wallet. The moths that fly out of it when opened, well, that’s another story. [New York Times - Thanks, Matt!]

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Car Breathalyzer Mistakes Ice Cream for Alcohol, Doesn’t Let Man Drive Home [Breathalyzers]

You may want to hand your keys over after a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, because in Australia, a man’s car breathalyzer refused to start his engine after he ate an Ice Cream Bar.

UPI reports that the unidentified man, who lives in Frankston, Australia, claims he ate Bubble O’Bill ice cream (pictured above), right before blowing into the breathalyzer, which caused the false positive. Afterwards went before a court asking to have the breathalyzer removed from his car.

The court decided to verify the error with a second test. Without eating the Ice Cream, the man’s BAC was .0000. Immediately after taking two bites, it was .0018. The man got his wish, and the breathalyzer was removed. But the larger cause for concern here is what he did to get stuck with the breathalyzer in the first place? And what will he do now that he’s no longer shackled to the buzz killer? [UPI via Tech Dirt via Prefix Forums]

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Tesco’s £349 Mini 10 actually a £349 Mini 9

Can you say “oops?” That so-called Mini 10, which curiously emerged at Tesco before anywhere else, is actually not a Mini 10. As the story goes, folks across the pond who plunked down £349 for their very own 10-inch Dell netbook have started receiving shipments only to find a perfectly average Mini 9 within. Furthermore, Tesco’s Mini 10 order page is now completely nonexistent, further signaling that a serious mishap occurred somewhere along the line. Hate to burst your bubble, but if you ordered one of these pups from this vendor, you should probably expect to hit the return to sender option and eagerly await a refund.

[Via PortableMonkey, thanks Peter]

Filed under: Laptops

Tesco’s £349 Mini 10 actually a £349 Mini 9 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Jan 2009 19:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows 7 Beta in-depth impressions

We’ve covered a few tidbits of what the Windows 7 Beta has to offer, including the mess of machines we’ve installed it on, but we finally gathered together all our thoughts and impressions of the OS into one meaty pile of words and screencaps. Naturally, we’re working with a beta here, so things can absolutely get better (or worse), and Redmond might be hiding a feature or two in the wings — or for the inevitable SP1 — but we’d say Microsoft has really put its best foot forward here. Check out all our ramblings after the break.

Continue reading Windows 7 Beta in-depth impressions

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Windows 7 Beta in-depth impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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