Apple still touts the Mac’s supposed immunity to viruses as an advantage over WindowsAn inconvenient truth, indeed:
For the first time, Apple is recommending the use of anti-virus tools to protect Mac systems.
Long something of a phantom menace, strains of malware capable of infecting Mac machines have gradually been increasing in prevalence over recent months. In addition, VXers are making more use of web-based attack and applications specific vulnerabilities to infect PCs whatever their underlying operating system might be.
Windows-specific malware attacks are still orders of magnitude greater than assaults on Mac machines, but the risk to Apple fans is now enough for the Church of Jobs to admit a risk exists.
The admission that security scanner software was a good idea for Mac users came in an unheralded update to Apple’s support site made on 21 November, first picked up by Brian Krebs at Security Fix on Monday.
Apple goes further than just recommending the use of one scanner to advise the use of multiple tools. “Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple anti-virus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult,” it said.
The supposed invulnerability of Macs to viruses has long been a selling point and marketing mantra for Macs’ superiority over the Windows world – as the screenshot I’ve taken of Apple.com’s “Why a Mac” page demonstrates (see above). The idea that you need two anti-virus tools by Apple’s own recommendation is actually pretty funny; if I were Microsoft I’d cut an ad saying that the Mac platform is so unstable, just one virus scanner doesn’t cut it!
Champloo is (so far) a tale of two samurai who hate each other, but who are (ostensibly) helping a young girl find a mysterious third samurai who “smells of sunflowers”. It’s set in historical Japan but has giant disclaimers about historical accuracy in the title credits (which are annoyingly set to harsh hip hop music; thankfully the actual score during the episodes is much more bearable). The basic theme so far is that Japan has slipped from its moral moorings, and now power matters more than honor – with many of the secondary characters they meet (so far) being enmeshed in the transition between the older tradition and the new lawless era, particularly the two rival yakuza gangs that they deal with in episodes 3 and 4.
It’s a pretty gripping story. It’s actually quite violent, with plenty of blood and suggestive sexuality (but not overt). However it doesn’t stray into gore, but rather conveys the brutality of the era quite well in a restrained way – characters limbs are severed, but you don’t seethe actual limb, just the agony on the loser’s face, for example, or a fatal blow is inflicted below camera and the victim’s mouth fillls with blood. The characters so far have managed to distinguish themselves from each other, and the usual samurai stereotypes, quite well. The first disc has done enough to capture my interest that I’ve added the whole series to my queue.
I’ve long subscribed to the theory that MJ is an evil genius mastermind. I think he’s probably got an IQ north of 175. Seriously, the man is like Lex Luthor and (Asimov’s) The Mule rolled into one.
How else to explain this? He’s obviously up to something nefarious. I think he’s got an island villa somewhere, like in The Incredibles, where he hatches his schemes in James Bond Villain chic.
If ever Michael Jakcson were to visit Japan, the combination of wierd and awesome might implode the Earth.
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer, and so on. The bartender says “You’re all idiots”, and pours two beers.
Today’s XKCD gets me thinking, as always, about Hitchhiker’s Guide:
excerpt from A bunch of Rocks (XKCD 11/17/08)
Quoth the Guide:
“…we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere … and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.”
One of my mantras is to rely on others to filter my data in the social web, because the key to improving your signal to noise ratio is not to try and filter the noise, but actually to reduce your signal. That’s a lot harder than it sounds to do. But it’s made a lot easier by genuinely smart filterers like Dave Winer’s NewsJunk, which was an invaluable tool during the election season. Winer basically culled the best and most interesting news stories (by hand) and fed them to a dedicated RSS feed, which then fed into twitter. As a result I often briefed myself on the day’s politics by first checking @newsjunkies rather than wading into my mess of feeds on Google Reader cold. This is why i am genuinely sad to see that Winer is considering pulling the plug on NewsJunk now that the election has ended.
I can’t help myself. I don’t want to repeat my anticipation/disappointment cycle of Episode I but this is hitting all the right buttons for me.
And, the bad guys are Romulans. They are so much more interesting than Klingons… but speaking of Klingons, they also are rumored to be done right – without foreheads. As Worf said, “We don’t speak of it.”
In Monsters, Inc, the blooper reel clearly shows that the movie was a movie, with outtakes by everyone including Randall indicating that they were just playing roles. But included in the blooper reel is the Company Play, titled “Put That Thing Back Where It Came From” and that seems to be in a separate continuity than the bloopers. So the question is, it is a silly play put on by the cast of Monsters Inc in “real life” or is it actually part of the movie continuity, occurring sometime after the events of the film?
No, this is probably not even remotely important to anyone besides me. And maybe Brian. This is what pops in my head while trying to get my youngest to drink her milk while playing the blooper reel of Monsters, Inc as a distraction.
