EDSARevolution.com

Proud to announce the launch of EDSARevolution.com — home to the full text of Angela Stuart-Santiago‘s “Chronology of a Revolution” manuscript.

mmmMMMMooooo…!

The Moo MiniCards are in! Based on the excellent Dawn M‘s equally excellent Moo MiniCard templates, a gift for the Missus featuring the three little ones.

3Geez…

As geeks the world over slowly recover from the lingering effects of the Jobs Reality Distortion Field, I imagine more than a few are going, “Uh, that’s it?”

The keynote itself was something of a let down. No new, non-wussy (as opposed to the Mac Mini), non-sissy (as opposed to the iMac) mid-range desktop, no MacBook EEE, no “one more thing”. I mean, really, after he pulled that stunt and introduced the I-still-want-one-btw G4 Cube back in 2000, he set a bar of expectation he’s not likely to clear or live down any time soon (although he did come close last year).

But it’s the iPhone 3G that’s really got me going, “Ooh, bulk delete. Big. Whoop.”

Go Gear 2.0

I realized this post was starting to get rather long and Pournelle-esque as I was writing it and thought briefly of breaking it up into several posts. But I figured it would be easier to ignore and skip the inanity of the whole thing if it was just another entry. So, here…

My daily Go Gear’s seen some sophisticated upgrades since I first posted about it. The most significant of which has got to be the MacBook Air which replaced the 2.16GHz black MacBook.

(flickr-noted version)

Locked but Loaded

Last week, Cisco let it be known that he was ready to give up his Mac Mini in exchange for a Windows PC. It’s what his friends have, it’s what his school runs, and, well, he’s seven.

Still, going from OS X to Windows? Giving up the slick ‘stack-of-six-CDs’ form factor for a mini-tower’s worth of eyesore? Apple to MS? The boy needed some serious talking-to. Two days I geared up for it, simplifying my reasoning to elementary school level. But in so doing, I completely defeated my own arguments. And, well, he’s seven.

So I spent the weekend putting together a decent XP-class P4 out of my previous two rigs. An upper-end core solo from right before the duos took over, a couple of gigs of RAM, an 80 gig drive for the OS and a 320 for his growing collection of, uh, ripped media, etc.

Now, I’m pretty handy with XP. I managed and was the technical lead in two projects that migrated whole critical networks of hundreds of workstations over to the platform from NT. I designed the Active Directory configuration for the severs and developed tightly locked down, closely managed workstation configurations for a variety of user types and requirements. I took full advantage and squeezed every bit of functionality I could from global/local policies, user profiles, and everything the Zero Admin initiatives could give me to come up with a solid, reliable, and relatively secure XP-based workstation build.

So no bot-net-bait on this home network. This little guy’s machine will be locked up tight as a drum. But after a relatively blissful year on the OS X security bubble (which is fast approaching critical mass as the Mac market share does the same — inevitably attracting the ne’er do wells and popping this lickable aqua-themed bubble) and all that vaunted XP experience, I still can’t help but feel like I’m handing the kid a loaded gun. Or a thermolyte explosive charge with remote detonators scattered all over the Internet.

I’m not an Apple elitist by any means — I run Vista on my primary desktop mostly by choice, and I’m learning to love my media-serving, torrent-leeching ‘buntu box — but this has got me asking, how responsible is this?

And, more importantly, is there a special circle in hell for those who give XP boxes to their kids?