A rather newer one, a 2015 with a Retina display, as a matter of fact! My plan was to buy a 2012 MBP since it could be serviced, and that was going to run $600-800, so this will be quite a savings ( Read more... )

In two weeks we'll be in Phoenix and our trip to Europe begins! I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to this ( Read more... )

A couple of months ago I posted that security researchers had found a valid exploit to alter the microcontrollers on USB devices, making an attack vector that's almost impossible to detect or fix ( Read more... )

Basically, the NSA doesn't want to watch communications on a computer-by-computer basis. They tap backbones, the connections where huge amounts of information flows between internet servers. They tap major ISPs. Your computer? Chump change. If they know what you're saying to other people, they don't really need to tap your computer. And the ( Read more... )

Well, it's a new wireless data transfer specification. 802.11 is the IEEE standard for "... is a set of physical layer standards for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6, 5 and 60 GHz frequency bands" (Wikipedia), and currently there are four finalized and approved standards: A, B, G, N (not in ( Read more... )

Yesterday I needed to reformat one of my 500 gig externals to a Windows format to copy a Parallels VM image from a Sony laptop. So I dug out my LaCie 500 gig Firewire/USB. Couldn't reformat it. SMART status said it was OK, but there was clearly a problem ( Read more... )

I really don't know what to make of this. They buy Compaq, who had bought DEC, they buy 3Com, they buy Palm, the sell off the test instrumentation division which was the core of HP, and now they're dumping the PC line. They apparently have decided that the Palm/WebOS direction was a total waste of time and they're abandoning it, so you might be ( Read more... )

Hmmm. Putting their entire focus behind PATA and probably SCSI. I was talking to someone yesterday about my doubts of buying another desktop, a high-end laptop is just so useful, especially if you have a wireless router that you can connect an external hard drive to. IDE is definitely a little long in the tooth, and drives are always the slowest ( Read more... )