The only party that comes out looking spiffy in the debacle that was today’s wildcat strike? GO Transit, who probably amazed more than just me with their newfound commitment to transit outside commuting hours. Union-Richmond Hill service starts at 9 a.m. (!!) and ends just after midnight? (!!!!!!!!) Those are some mighty impressive operating hours right there.

The rest of you—the union that decided an illegal strike would win the hearts of commuters and the TTC management that refused to tell anyone what the hell was going on before it was too late—can go to hell.

A slightly botched thermal paste cleanup on a MacBook Pro leads to an interesting possibility: maybe it’s not the grease that’s the problem, but the fans. If true, this would explain the success some (but not all) people have had with the firmware update that purported to drop running temperatures a couple of notches.

My desktop computer already sounds like a small tornado, and I manage to nap/sleep with it on, so the idea of having a MacBook with its fans on constantly (or at least more often) doesn’t bother me one iota. Of course, not all the reports on the firmware have been good, so the jury’s still out.

Criticizing internet discussion is like shooting fish in a barrel. Criticizing internet fandom is like shooting fish in smaller barrel.

I’m about to do both anyways. There’s your disclaimer.

From Engadget: “That’s right, for all their laptop innovations Apple doesn’t seem to have managed to figure out how to keep these Dual Cores cool, and it looks like you might have to resort to thermal paste shenanigans to keeps this thing cool enough to sit on your lap…. Otherwise, the laptop looks like quite the deal and a decent performer.” (emphasis added)

Contrast with comments on the same post: “I’m personally getting pretty tired of the rather skewed view of Apple over here at Engadget.(…) Keep the biased posts to yourselves and give honest reporting to your loyal audience.” Or then there’s “of course, the heat issue is.. not an issue, if you have this thing on a table… It’s not really an Apple engineering PROBLEM as much as it is a DECISION..” And then there’s my favourite, “#2 You’re right, you should stick to PeeCees. Based on your decision making process, you’re too dumb to use anything else.”

As I’m sure the three of you who read this regularly already know, I’m seriously considering buying a MacBook—in fact, the two things keeping me from plunking down the cash right now is a) my overzealous fiscal restraint and b) the thermal grease issue. And though I’ve criticized many things Apple has done in the past, it’s always been with the understanding that because Apple has done so much right in the past decade, they should be held to a higher standard. I own Apple products and will likely continue to buy them.

But let me say this: the worst thing about Apple, by far, are Apple zealots. As far as I’m concerned, you could shove them all into a cannon and fire them into the sun. A laptop should not run at 80 degrees celsius, full stop. Thermal grease is meant to be applied in thin layers, not giant goops.

I guess today I got tired of people claiming that Engadget was anti-Apple, when in reality their definition of “bias” just meant “contrary to what I deem to be the truth.” Stay tuned, folks: tomorrow I’ll take on the current state of internet political debate! Guess what that’ll read like.

Well, my favourite Scottish laptop has finally arrived, and for the past few days I’ve been reading up on the MacBook. As the first completely new Intel Mac product (though the mini, iMac and MacBook Pro are all drastically different, I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re 100% new), the MacBook is an impressive piece of work. It’s the best looking iBook descendant to date, and the specs are quite good for an Apple low-end laptop—so good that the MacBook is actually fairly competitive price-wise with comparable PC laptops. From the magnetic latch to the easy-to-upgrade RAM and hard drive enclosures, there isn’t much to dislike about the MacBook on the surface; most of the outstanding issues appear to be contentious ones, such as the integrated graphics (which I think people are perhaps making too much of a fuss about) and the glossy screen (haven’t seen one in the flesh yet, so I don’t know how bad it is, but I hear “not very”). Most of all, I really want one. I may very well purchase one. A home run for Apple, then?

Well, not exactly. The heat problems with the MacBook Pros have returned with the MacBook, it appears, and apparently the same cause persists:

Yes, the machine still runs hot. Individuals with access to the MacBook’s service manual indicate that it—like the MacBook Pro manual—suggests applying piles of thermal compound. My analysis of the temperatures seem to bear this out.

It’s one thing to make an honest mistake and screw up the application of thermal grease on one system (though how this got past Apple engineers, I’ll never know); it’s another to then repeat the same mistake on your new mass-market model, after everyone’s given you flak for the initial problem. This whole thermal grease issue has put me off buying a MacBook a bit; the thought of having to crack open my laptop just to fix a stupid but major problem like that is ludicrous.

Autoweek pit five vastly different cars against each other in a fuel economy shootout. For the most part, the vehicles did what the EPA numbers expected them to; and the “shocking development” was that the Prius, with a rated 51 mpg highway consumption rating, fell short of the Jetta TDI (42 mpg EPA highway) by a full 8 mpg—42 to the Jetta’s 50. But that’s not all that shocking if you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to automobile developments on the other side of the pond; diesels are far more prevalent in Europe and the hybrid-diesel comparison has been performed a number of times, with the diesels almost always coming out on top. Also recall that it was VW—who have invested heavily in diesel technologies and are the only brand to have a substantial lineup of diesel cars in North America—that built a diesel-fueled prototype that did 264 mpg, the equivalent of 0.89L/100km. Indeed, the real worth of hybrid technology in general has been in doubt for a while, and though it will continue to improve as more people buy them, it’s quite obvious that hybrids aren’t the silver bullet when it comes to solving the looming hydrocarbon crisis.

But back to the Autoweek story. The really shocking development to me wasn’t the Jetta’s supremacy; it was the performance of some of the other cars in the shootout. The two cars that finished last in the shootout? The Jeep Commander (330 hp) and the Chevrolet Corvette (400 hp). But while the Commander did a fairly dismal 17 mpg, the Corvette managed to get 27.2 miles to the gallon despite running on all eight cylinders the whole time (the Hemi in the Jeep has a multiple displacement system that can shut off half of the cylinders at cruising speed). That’s only 6 mpg off the Honda Accord Hybrid, the fifth car tested in the shootout. How did they achieve 27 mpg? They drove at highway speeds while in sixth gear, leaving the engine to hum along at under 2000 rpm.

Not that sports cars are terribly fuel efficient either, but at least it makes me feel a lot better about watching Top Gear.

On Livejournal, sometimes the code breaks if you try to write <3. So often most people would go “I LESS THAN THREE YOU!”

I need a t-shirt that says this. Right now.

Blue Security is an anti-spam software firm whose tactics are taken out of the vigilante justice handbook: Blue Frog will automatically send a complaint e-mail to the sender of any spam message. Great in theory, but considering the number of users a single spam e-mail hits, a co-ordinated response from thousands of Blue Frog users is no longer just registering a complaint; it’s a distributed denial of service attack, which can shut down any site real quick due to a massive influx of traffic. Besides the ethical problems of using a DDoS attack at all, there’s also the question of effectiveness; anyone who’s ever tried to track down the source of spam knows that it’s a difficult task, and the presence of worms and viruses that turn unsuspecting users into spam-spewing zombie machines make Blue Frog’s mandate, hitting spammers where they live, very difficult. But according to Eran Aloni, the director of marketing at Blue Security (read the first comment), the company has a “strict policy never to cause any harm to innocent third parties.”

That all went out the window this week, when Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type and the maintainers of the MT-driven blogging service Typepad, unwittingly found itself the target of “a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack.” Six Apart have been very quiet on the subject, but others found out very quickly what had happened: Blue Security had been attacked by a major spammer site, and in response the company redirected all the bogus traffic to their Typepad blog. The crushing amount of traffic brought down Typepad, Livejournal and the other Six Apart sites for a number of hours; meanwhile attempts to contact Blue Security about the DDoS were in vain, as the company was on holiday (May 3rd was a holiday in Israel, where the company is based).

Even now Blue Security is adamant that it didn’t do anything wrong:

“The major denial of service attack at TypePad was because of us hosting with TypePad,” Reshef told Computer Business Review.

(…)

Reshef said Blue replaced the front page of its site with the TypePad blog to keep its users up to date with events, and disagreed with commentary that said Blue acted irresponsibly by passing the DDoS burden to Six Apart.

“We didn’t offload any DDoS,” he said. “That’s like blaming the victim of a crime.”

So much for never causing any harm to third parties.

I’m so glad that Canadian politics is still provincial enough (no pun intended) that stuff like this doesn’t immediately bring on the Pundit Brigade:

Gerry Nicholls thought he was hallucinating as he kicked back in his seat to take the 35-minute GO train ride to his Oakville home.

About every three seconds, the scrolling electronic sign that usually carries transit updates and advertisements had a very different message that he just could not keep his eyes off.

“Stephen Harper Eats Babies. Stephen Harper Eats Babies. Stephen Harper Eats Babies,” the message kept repeating.

(…)

Asked about his time with Harper at the National Citizens Coalition, Nicholls said: “I worked with Stephen Harper for five years and never once did he in that time eat a baby.”

Perhaps for true bipartisanship, someone should hijack other GO Transit signs. “Jack Layton strangles puppies,” anyone?

(also see: Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, aka “reptilian kitten-eater”)

Behold the new Shameless Magazine website.