Logging The Cyber World

Apple’s reported plans to introduce new laptops next week are seasoned with a particularly titillating rumor that the company will unveil an $800 laptop that would close much of the price gap with low-cost PC laptops.

On Thursday, Apple sent out an announcement stating, “The spotlight turns to notebooks,” and inviting recipients to a launch event on Oct. 14.

An $800 laptop — allegedly crafted from single pieces of aluminum using a laser and water jet process known by the code-name “brick” — would be a dramatic price drop from Apple’s current lowest-price standard laptop, which carries a $1,099 retail price point. That’s a $300 price cut and, while still substantially higher than low-cost PCs, would bring a Mac machine into the affordability price range of a whole new wave of users.

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Hewlett-Packard says it has achieved a mobile-computing milestone by getting the HP EliteBook 6930p to operate continuously for 24 hours on a single battery charge. The laptop used in the test is, however, rather different from those consumers would pick up at the store, at least for now.

The machine’s equipped with high-end components including Intel solid-state hard drives (SSDs), a mercury-free LED display, and an optional ultra-capacity battery.

The cream-of-the-crop components played a crucial role in making the 24-hour battery life possible. HP says the Illumi-Lite LED display, by itself, boosts battery run time by up to four hours compared with traditional LCD displays, and the Intel SSD provides up to a 7 percent increase in battery life compared with traditional hard drives.

Article from CNET News

Apple’s share of the global operating system market is climbing steadily, and could top 8% this month, statistics from a Web metrics firm showed Wednesday.

The latest monthly numbers from Net Applications show that Mac OS X had 7.94% of the market in June. Considering that its share has been climbing an average of 0.18% a month over the last 10 months, Mac OS X could top 8% this month. In August 2007, the Apple OS had 6.18% of the market.

During the same period, Linux has also increased market share, rising to 0.8% of the market in June from 0.47% last August, according to Net Applications. Meanwhile, the global market share of Microsoft Windows has declined over the last 10 months. In June, Windows accounted for 90.89% of the market, down from 93.06%.

Complete article from Yahoo! News

They’re in our computers, reading our files. The Chinese government, that is, according to two U.S. Congressmen who recently accused Beijing of sending hackers to ferret out secret documents stored on Congressional computers. The Chinese deny any involvement, but if they were lying, would we be able to prove it?

The answer, according to computer and security experts, is probably not.

At least, not conclusively enough for a court of law.

“It’s very difficult to track hacker attacks and, even if you can track it, you don’t always know with 100 percent certainty if you’re right,” said James Lewis, director and senior fellow of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

That was the problem faced by the investigators who attempted to figure out who broke into computers used by the staff of Rep. Christopher H. Smith, R-N.J., and Rep. Frank R. Wolf, R-Va. The Congressmen announced on June 11 that they’d been the targets of several attacks, beginning in 2006.

Both Smith and Wolf are high-profile critics of the Chinese government. They told reporters that, among other things, the hackers stole lists of identities of Chinese dissidents and records from Congressional human-rights hearings.

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The Windows XP era ends June 30 and soon hardware vendors will be shipping you all Vista all the time (in most cases). The save XP effort failed. The whining should cease. And now it’s time for Vista to sink or swim.

Ina Fried has a good overview of where Windows XP will stand with PC manufacturers. And Matt Asay highlights a report from Evans Data noting that 92 percent of developers are ignoring Vista. Coupling these two items together and you come to one conclusion: Folks are skeptical about Vista, but a lot of that skepticism is because XP is still lingering.

“Only eight percent of North American software developers are currently writing applications to run on Microsoft’s Vista operating system, while half are still writing programs for XP, according to Evans Data’s Spring 2008, North American Development Survey. These same developers forecast a fragmented Windows market in 2009 with only 24 percent expecting to target Vista and 29% expecting to continue with XP.”

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Learn more on how to use further of your laptop in a weird way.

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Mountain House (CA) - Computex Taipei 2008 is just around the corner and news of what we can expect to see at the conference is already trickling in. Nvidia will release its new GeForce GTX 280 and 260 GPUs, AMD its Radeon 4850 and 4870 as well as its Puma notebook platform.

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Microsoft demonstrated its multitouch interface for its upcoming Windows 7 operating system on Tuesday. The interface provides a touch-screen input for users to interact with their computers.

Full Article at Pcworld.

An anonymous hacker has posted personal data about 6 million Chilean residents on the Internet, highlighting wider privacy problems in the country.

The data was posted early Saturday morning on Fayerwayer.com, a popular Chilean technology blog.

The hacker, who calls himself “Anonymous Coward,” posted three compressed files of data that included names, addresses, telephone numbers and taxpayer identification numbers for Chilean residents, said Leo Prieto, Fayerwayer.com’s director.

Complete Article Here (PCWorld.com).

The scientists of Southern Federal University won 750,000 dollars award for the development of the systems of the mental computer control. For the next 18 months Rostov scientists together with their Taganrog and Saint Petersburg colleagues are going to develop programs and make a research that will help them to create such a system.

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