Finally, just got this email:

It's finally here: Google Chrome for Mac. Available today in beta!

Hi there,

Thanks for signing up to hear from us regarding Google Chrome for Mac! We're excited to let you know that Google Chrome is now available in beta for Mac OS X.

Here are a few fun facts from us on the Google Chrome for Mac team:

73,804 lines of Mac-specific code written
29 developer builds
1,177 Mac-specific bugs fixed
12 external committers and bug editors to the Google Chrome for Mac code base, 48 external code contributors
64 Mac Minis doing continuous builds and tests
8,760 cups of soft drinks and coffee consumed
4,380 frosted mini-wheats eaten

Got taken to this page.

Where if you click on the lego image, you can see the Google Chrome Staff in lego form.. keep clicking for closeups. (not here, first go to the google chrome link one sentence above then start clicking)

Then watched the new ads(there's a bunch of them, at the end of each use the in movie menu, or click here):

 

Then read the blog post announcement here.

Where they had this video:

And also mentioned the Linux beta, and extensions.

Then I installed it and tried it out. It's fast. So I finished writing this in Chrome. Wonder how this will affect browser market share.

Just a quick psa I've been asked to do from time to time, if you don't see the irony, you should call the government immediately. Now on with some stuff I feel like writing.

I've been critical of Microsoft pretty much any time I talk about them but it should be noted that they do produce a lot of really awesome stuff. It just so happens that I'm a programmer/web guy and Microsoft's web endeavours tend to be very shitty and politicky (see Bing, Windows Live, IE), so I talk a lot about that side of the company. I also really dislike Windows having used it for years and realizing and re-realizing that it's just an all round stale sandwich, and from what I've seen of Windows 7 they still can't seem to deliver a good OS. But with that said I do think some of their hardware stuff is incredible. Like the Xbox, Natal, Surface and their labs projects like Photososynth and Seadragon are wow.

What I'm trying to say here is Microsoft Courier. If you haven't seen it just do a video search and watch the demo. Why would anyone use an old school notepad and pencil when you could have a super intelligent dual screen tablet like that? No really I'm asking. And I read somewhere it'll hit the shelves soonish. It looks to me that this form factor at least, if not the Courier itself will become an essential home/business device. Like a toaster or printer.

The other thing is electric cars. If you go to BetterPlace.com you can find out all about this company that's figured out how to make 100% electric cars feasible now. They're starting out with smaller countries (namely Israel, Denmark, and others), they say they'll deploy the first cars around 2011 and go commercial in 2012. In two years there will be places that have fully electric, regular sized cars and more importantly the infrastructure of charging stations and battery swapping... stations, (for when you don't have time to charge the battery) to back it up. They've committed to having at least 100,000 cars on the road and in dealerships by 2016, and they currently have a range of about 170km on a full charge which when you add battery replacement stations - a process that takes about 2 minutes - could potentially be extended infinitely. Oh yeah I almost forgot instead of paying for electricity or new batteries you pay for miles/kilometres you drive, like a pre-paid cell phone.

I wrote yesterday about Light Peak, according to Engadget the specification was dictated [sic] to Intel by Apple who plan on putting it in a line of Macs as early as next fall. The plan eventually being that it will replace all other protocols (see USB, Firewire, DVI, Ethernet, eSATA) so if you've been waiting for USB 3.0 or core i7's in a Mac or you already have one in a PC and thought you were ahead of the curve, the game is about to completely change and you're probably gonna have to replace it all starting next year with new super fast stuff that uses optical connectors. You know, it would be nice if just once they waited till after todays new cool stuff was out and being used before teasing us with the next huge leap in technology. I guess it's more profitable to never actually satisfy the consumer.

A good friend of mine works at an ad agency in the States. His company was recently hired by Apple to create some print ads and billboards for the tablet Macbook they're releasing in a few months. My friend is not working on the Apple campaign but a guy that he said, "sits near his cubicle" apparently is and was working on some creative. He went over to talk to him to try catch a sneak peek at the new tablet and the guy "just got up and ran to the bathroom in the middle of the conversation, so I opened Firefox in porn mode and emailed it to myself so I could look at it later," he said.

When he called me that night to brag that he'd seen the future I naturally didn't believe him, I didn't even know he had a job. heh. So he sent me a copy and now I'm sharing it with the world. So without further nonsense here it is, click it for a bigger version.

digg_url = 'http://fightskillz.com/2009/07/macbook-tablet-leaked-image/';

Aside from the tablet itself, which I guess has a soft keyboard.. It looks too thin in that photo to open up like a regular Macbook, but aside from that there's a 3G icon in the menubar next to blue-tooth. I guess they upgraded the Macbook line to Macbook Pros at the last keynote so they could use the Macbook name for the new tablets. Cause if you can write on the screen it's more like a physical notebook, and I guess they want 'Macbook' to be the Mac Notebook, probably to be targeted at low end users and students. Also there's no EyeSight or mic. The mic could be on the side or hidden in the frame but it seems a little extreme to leave out the camera especially since it'll be a middle tier between iPhone and Macbook Pro, which both have cameras, and if they left it out then why is there a Photo Booth icon in the dock? It's more likely that there's a camera on the back similar to the iPhone. It doesn't make sense to me why for the iPhone and apparently the Tablet they can't just put the camera on the front for video conferencing. Then again it's a mobile product and a) Video conferencing over 3G wouldn't be all that great and b) On the go you're probably taking pictures of other stuff. It's hard to gauge physical dimensions but I'd imagine if students are carrying it around everywhere it's about 11/12 inches diagonally.

Big question: Will it need a sim card to get 3G service? and a monthly plan... will you be able to make Calls from it or text? I don't think so, but I think I'm gonna keep my eyes open for info from cell companies. When the iPhone first came out they were pretty quiet until right before but it looks like recently Apple's been looser when it comes to secrecy. Or at least there are significant leaks down the ladder, like that guy that jumped out of his 11 story apartment after losing one of the iPhone prototypes he was transporting the other day. Then again why would they have secret iPhone prototypes when they just released the 3GS and augmented reality is coming out soon. There's no reason to be working on the next iPhone for a while. Maybe there was no prototype and the story's just a diversion to draw attention away from the tablet before it's release.

While I've been Mac based for more than a year now (and how fantastic it is), I still have an old Windows box that I use as a local media server. I know from experience not to put anything valuable on it, and as an added layer of security for this still-paranoid-former-Windows-user I have a dual boot setup with the latest Kubuntu as a just-in-case. At least I'll be able to get online and troubleshoot. Despite my best practices I've just had to go through an all to familiar process with a family member's laptop. A majorly corrupt memory module caused a Windows XP re-installation to fail midway. The only option was to erase the hard drive, from something called Doctor Dos. Regardless after several hours of erasing everything, turning on the machine seemed pointless. First something called Intel Boot Agent kept declaring there was no operating system on any storage devices. After playing around with the BIOS settings changing the boot order and putting copies of Linux onto everything from thumb-drives to cds without any luck, I eventually went back into the BIOS and disabled network boot. This solved one problem and caused another. It was no longer declaring "no operating system found" after long stints of doing nothing but was now just a blank screen and a blinking cursor. Now finally something I recognized, I had done this to my computers plenty of times, I knew there was an easy way out, but just couldn't remember what it was. Naturally I spent the next 4 hours trying everything and anything, but then Google proved it couldn't solve every problem and as I went into that dark place of accepting I'd lost and reached for a hammer, the familiarity of the rooms emotion accessed that one piece of information I needed. All I had to do was tap shift a bunch of times while it was starting up with [any] bootable operating system disk in the cd tray and installation would start, it would all be resolved... but by the time that thought was complete the laptop was in 12 pieces on the desk in front of me, strangely all the vowel keys must have seen it coming and were way on the other side of the room, and one fluid motion to the next I snapped the biggest remaining pieces over my knee, and will likely have a serious limp for the rest of my life. So to anyone in the future, just hit shift a bunch of times.

After a year and a half of using a mac I can say for certain that it's a far more secure environment than windows. I can't imagine ever doing anything important on a windows machine ever again, back when I used windows for work re-installing the entire operating system was a monthly routine, about 90% of these incidents were virus related despite heavy use of system intensive anti-virus software, firewalls, anti-spyware software, and every other effort to prevent it.

While reading a debate on a tech-blog between the commenters of a provocative post polling whether or not you use anti-virus software and why, I ran across a link to an article written almost 2 years ago at InfoWorld [http://weblog.infoworld.com]. The point argument: which is the safer operating system--Windows or OS X, and the old claim that the reason there are no mac viruses* is due to Apple's small market share (of millions and millions of customers). The following is an excerpt from the article listing some of the technical holes that exist in Windows and not in OS X that would allow a virus to get into your system, and hide. Since it's writing Apple has released a Leopard which is even more secure than previous versions, while Microsoft has done the same, most of these flaws still exist in Vista where the most tangible security improvement being disabled by most users due to it's irritating nature.

...

• All Windows background processes/daemons are spawned from a single hyper-privileged process and referred to as services.

• By default, Windows launches all services with SYSTEM-level privileges.

• SYSTEM is a pseudo-user (LocalSystem) that trumps Administrator (like UNIX's root) in privileges. SYSTEM cannot be used to log in, but it also has no password, no login script, no shell and no environment, therefore

• The activity of SYSTEM is next to impossible to control or log.

• Most of the code running on any Windows system at a given time is related to services, most or all of which run with SYSTEM privileges, therefore

• Successful infection of running Windows software carries a good chance of access to SYSTEM privileges.

• Windows buries most privileged software, service executables and configuration files in a single, unstructured massive directory (SYSTEM32) that is frequently used by third parties. Windows will notify you on an attempt to overwrite one of its own system files stored here, but does not try to protect privileged software.

• Microsoft does not sign or document the name and purpose of the files it places in SYSTEM32.

• Windows has no equivalent to OS X's bill of materials, so it cannot validate permissions, dates and checksums of system and third-party software.

• Windows requires that users log in with administrative privileges to install software, which causes many to use privileged accounts for day-to-day usage.

• Windows requires extraordinary effort to extract the path to, and the files and TCP/UDP ports opened by, running services, and to certify that they are valid.

• Microsoft made it easy for commercial applications to refuse a debugger's attempt to attach to a process or thread. Attackers use this same mechanism to cloak malware. A privileged user must never be denied access to a debugger on any system. My right to track down malware on my computers trumps vendors' interests in preventing piracy or reverse-engineering. Maintaining that right is one of the reasons that open source commercial OS kernels are so vital.

• Access to the massive, arcane, nearly unstructured, non-human-readable Windows Registry, which was to be obsolete by now, remains the only resource a Windows attacker needs to analyze and control a Windows system.

• Another trick that attackers learned from Microsoft is that Registry entries can be made read-only even to the Administrator, so you can find an exploit and be blocked from disarming it.

• Malicious code or data can be concealed in NTFS files' secondary streams. These are similar to HFS forks, but so few would think to look at these.

• One of the strongest tools that Microsoft has to protect users from malware is Access Control Lists (ACLs), but standard tools make ACLs difficult to employ, so most opt for NTFS's inadequate standard access rights.

Why this can't happen under OS X:

• OS X has no user account with privileges exceeding root.

• Maximum privilege is extended only to descendants of process ID 1 (init or Darwin's launchd), a role that is rarely used and closely scrutinized.

• Unlike services.exe, launchd executes daemons and scheduled commands in a shell that's subject to login scripts, environment variables, resource limits, auditing and all security features of Darwin/OS X.

• Apple's daemons have man pages, and third parties are duty-bound to provide the same. Admins also expect to be able to run daemons, with verbose reporting, in a shell for testing.

• OS X Man pages document daemons' file dependencies, so administrators can easily rework file permissions to match daemons' reduced privileges.

• Launchd can tripwire directories so that if they're altered unexpectedly, launchd triggers a response.

• If an attacker takes over a local or remote console, any effort to install software or alter significant system settings cannot proceed without entering the administrator's user name and password, even if the console is already logged in as a privileged user. In other words, even having privileges doesn't ensure that even an inside hacker can arrange to keep them.

• OS X has a single console and a single system log, both in plain text.

• OS X's nearest equivalent to the Registry is Netinfo, but this requires authentication for modification. In later releases of OS X, it is fairly sparse.

• Applications have their own per-user and system-wide properties files, private Registries if you like, stored in human-readable files in standard locations.

• Every installed file is traceable to a bill of materials that can verify that the file is meant to exist, and that it and all of its dependencies match their original checksums. Mac users, back up and protect your Receipts folder!

• The directories used to hold OS X's privileged system executables are sacred. Anything new that pops up there is immediately suspect.

• OS X does not require that a user be logged in as an administrator to install software. The user or someone aiding the install needs to know the name and password of a local administrative user to complete the install. On a network, most software is installed using Remote Desktop, an inexpensive Systems Management Server-like console.

• The UNIX/POSIX API, standard command-line tools and open source tools leave malware unable to hide from a competent OS X administrator. It takes a new UNIX programmer longer to choose an editor than it does to write a console app that walks the process tree listing privileged processes. Finding the owners of open TCP/UDP ports or open files is similarly trivial. The "system" is not opaque.

• Basic OS X features can be put to use to make life miserable for malware. For example, Windows' hackable restore points are done better by OS X's ability to create encrypted, read-only disk images. They're simpler than archives, and you can mount them as volumes anywhere in your file hierarchy.

• Likewise, OS X Server will image any Mac client or server's local drives and maintain safe copies that can be used not only for restoration, but which can be booted from to guarantee that there's no trace of infection.

• When erase-and-reinstall is the only way to be sure, OS X Server automates it. It can safely capture the affected Mac's active drives before having that Mac boot from the fresh install image.

So, after all this, do I have enough to judge Windows inherently more vulnerable to severe malware than OS X? I do. ...

-- by Tom Jager at [http://weblog.infoworld.com/...s_inhe.html] - click to read the whole article.

* The term 'virus' used here relates to malicious software being installed on your system without your knowledge. There is some malicious software (that I am aware of) on macs, and there's no reason why anyone couldn't just write some malicious code, however the secure unix foundation of mac os x and all of it's security features prevent malicious code from being executed without your explicit consent in 99% of cases and if a virus does get running it can't do anything significant without knowing an admin username and password and even then without tipping off the numerous checks and balances that something is awry.