I was happily surprised buying an eBook through Apress today that they no longer DRM the PDF copies of the books. I had done some reading before about their eBooks and saw that they required passwords. This concerned me since I would like to read the books on my Droid, Linux and OSX machines. Which could all have issues if the DRM was specific to the Windows platform.

Apparently the lack of DRM is new for Apress, starting in August. Way to go Apress! I will not have an issue getting more books through them now.

As a side note, I wish Safari Books Online had the book I wanted. For whatever reason, this one was not present.

I am liking the new company so far, and its a great place to work. I would mention the name, but I am not allowed to. Blogging policy and all. The biggest thing I have learned in 1 week so far? How little I really know, its humbling. Having knowledge of technology and having real world experiences getting said technology to function in the work place are two completely different things. I have a lot to learn, and that’s exciting. Scary at the same time though.

Interesting piece by Schneier…

In another experiment, subjects completed an online survey where they were asked a series of personal questions, such as “Have you ever tried cocaine?” Half of the subjects completed a frivolous-looking survey — ­”How BAD are U??” — with a picture of a cute devil. The other half completed the same survey with the title “Carnegie Mellon University Survey of Ethical Standards,” complete with a university seal and official privacy assurances. The results showed that people who were reminded about privacy were less likely to reveal personal information than those who were not.

Privacy salience does a lot to explain social networking sites and their attitudes towards privacy. From a business perspective, social networking sites don’t want their members to exercise their privacy rights very much. They want members to be comfortable disclosing a lot of data about themselves.

I have often wondered why users for social networking sites are so willing to divulge personal information. Maybe because they do not think or see any mention of privacy? Maybe its other factors at work too, such as the change in social views on what is privacy, and what constitutes personal information that should be kept private.

The information that users willing give up on social networking sites blows my mind, yet users to not think twice about it. Regardless of whether it may be private or not. So this must also play a factor, it has become acceptable and perhaps the norm to display this information publicly.

The article makes me think about cloud computing and the storing of private and company data in the cloud. While users and companies will desire and expect security and privacy with their data, will the mention of this deter uptake? Even if subconsciously? Now, I would assume that a group will not let this deter them, and rather would expect this mentioning. Yet individuals on the other hand…

So an irritation with my Blackberry Curve has surfaced. The lack of memory. Not only the lack of memory, but the inability of the device to store anything other than media files on the memory card installed.

Whats really ironic about this, is RIM just launched their new app store. Yet the devices they seem to make cant take advantage of this. I really wanted to try this store out, see what it offered and perhaps get some applications for my device. Yet I can since I have no room to install the app store app, let alone more apps! More memory would be nice, the option on where to install data would even be better.

I have MDN in my feed list, yet find myself reading the site less and less. Even before I owned a Mac, I browsed the site to see what was going on with “the other” side of computing.

Now, I am finding it hard to stomach the ridiculous bias and fanboi’sim that exists with the editors. You will be hard pressed to find anything negative about Apple on the site, and when there is an article that paints the company in a negative light, you have the editors adding in comments in the article. Sometimes they are just stupid and wrong, other times outright pathetic and sick.

Take this article…

It’s simply natural selection in a modern age. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a brilliant self-made billionaire. Corner wino Ralph is a drunken self-made ward of the state. One has more means at his disposal to help him legally secure the liver transplant he needs to live than the other. One just has a better shot at living than the other. Some may not like it, considering it somehow “unfair,” but at its core, excluding blind luck, that’s how this world has worked since life began.

Yes, we know: Replace Ralph the welfare wino with little six-year-old doe-eyed orphan Annie who’s liver is failing without ever having processed a drop of wine. It’s very sad, but it’s still natural selection. Today, money is muscle; wealth means strength. And the strong are still the ones who tend to survive.

That’s a pretty sad take. Yet regardless of feelings, I guess I was wrong in my assumption of MDN being a news site rather than a propaganda machine. There have been some past articles that I would like to mention, yet I don’t want to search through all the articles to find them. And luckily these articles only dealt with technology rather than social issues.

Starting today I am done reading the site. And I hope anyone else who reads this site does the same. Perhaps they will only care when their ad revenue drops to insignificance. Yet I doubt this since they obviously live on another planet.

It would figure that a few weeks after I get my MacBook aluminum, that they would upgrade the lower priced white model. My number one consideration is usually CPU speed, and now the lower priced model has .13 GHz on me. Although this only adds 5% according to some tests, and that may be mainly academic, is still miffs me. But such is life in the computer industry, there is always something better shortly down the road.

I guess my question really is, why upgrade a model priced lower than your next bump up, make it faster, and still cost less? For $300, what do you get? LED backlighting, DDR3, laptop frame? Only one that I really get into is the backlighting.

I replaced my laptop with a Macbook. Its now been about 7 days or so, and thought I would mention my thoughts thus far. Nothing scientific at this point…

• Fast. While initial boot up times, reboots, are not blazing fast, the sleep function for OSX is much better than Vista so far. Vista would seem to degrade over time, the longer you went without reboots and constantly returning from sleep, the system would start to get very laggy and slow. Returning from sleep would start to hang and slow. Usually this would be solved with a reboot, but annoying non the less. While I will continue to monitor this as time goes on, it seems very promising to far.
• I would mention over all system speed over time, but I cannot comment after only a week. But I just wanted to mention this is something I will also be watching. Windows is notorious for slowing the longer you use. Causes such as file fragmentation, registry clogging up, etc.
• Program installation. It is very easy and fast to install programs. I love that most are simple drag and drops into the application folder. This allows for simple management and uninstalls, and also prevents a program from spewing its crap all over the system. Such as installing DLLs into the Windows directory, registry additions, and so on. I am sure OSX has some of this to a degree, no system is immune, but it seems to be better already. And any program preferences seem to be very easy to isolate and get rid of when needed.
• Open program management is a bit of a tossed bag to me. Some of this is habit (coming from a Windows user for over 15 years, what would you expect), and its all personal preference. With Windows, you see open applications on the task bar. Whether these are minimized, or behind other windows, or the current window. In OSX, if you minimize the application, it will go to the Dock. Yet if its just in the background of the open window, you will not see it in the Dock. Now… Expose is wonderful. And I love using the hotkey to flip between windows. But this has its downsides. For one, I think it is a more difficult to determine whats open. You may have other icons on your dock that arent open and looking for a little blue dot is hindersome. Furthermore, one of the annoying things that comes from this is the way I use Gmail and Google Chat integrated within Gmail. On Windows, I may be chatting, and then switch to another window. When my chat is updated, the application will blink. With OSX, if I have Firefox in the background I do not see this. When my sound is off, I can go for a while without seeing the update. Essentially I have to remember to check the browser. And no, I dont want to use iChat.

I have a few more, but for now thats enough. Overall, I can say my experience is great. I love OSX, I love the BSD internals, and can say with certainty that I will be getting a Mac for my next desktop. I will always be locked to a certain extent into Windows, but my primary OS will more than likely be replaced now. (Windows will now be used only for specific needed tasks that require it, along with Linux which I still use regulary too)

I should mention that I HATE April 1st. My RSS Feed list includes a lot of news sites so I can, /gasp, get NEWS! I dont want to have to guess whether what I am reading is real or not. Some sites are worse than others (I am looking at your Slashdot). Maybe my sense of humor is lacking, but I just want to read about news events.

Funny stuff…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ff2X_3P_4

This is just sad…

The survey of 200 Boston youths age 12 to 19 found that 51% said Brown bore responsibility, 46% said Rihanna was responsible, and 52% said both were to blame for the incident. In addition, 52% said the media were treating Brown unfairly, and “a significant number of males and females” surveyed said Rihanna was destroying Brown’s career.

[...]

This is beyond disturbing. Somehow our children have learned that violence is an acceptable and appropriate response to a domestic disagreement. This is what children learn from media messages like this cover of broad-circulating supermarket tabloid Star, which purports to reveal “What made Chris snap”. As if Rihanna could have said something to which the brutal attack of which Brown is accused was an understandable reaction. As if she stepped over the line and the vicious blows that bloodied her nose and mouth and swelled her eyes and forehead were justified.

Not even sure what to say… When did abuse for any reason become acceptable, and what does this say about the future youth of this nation?