Pedro Vera’s Web Log

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A children's advocacy group wants to keep a children's hospital from putting clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch's name on a new emergency room. art.hospital.ap.jpg The children's hospital in Columbus, Ohio, is named for Nationwide Insurance Co. Abercrombie, known for its racy marketing campaigns aimed at teenagers, has pledged $10 million toward the

Filed under: Cult of Mac, Apple, MacBook Air Apple doesn't just loan review units to anyone who asks. No, you have to be pretty high up on the tech journalism foodchain in order to be entrusted with review gear from Apple (you will note that TUAW does not receive any review units from our favorite fruit company). Steven Levy is decidedly amongst those who have no problems getting their hands on Apple's latest, with lots of help from the company itself (he was one of the 4 journalists who get an iPhone ahead of everyone else). Therefore, it is not surprising that Levy would have a MacBook Air on loan from Apple, but it is surprising what happened to said loaner MacBook Air. All was well with the MacBook Air, until Levy experienced a panic that anyone borrowing something from a huge multinational corporation never wants to feel: he couldn't find the darned thing. He feverishly traced his whereabouts and quickly ruled out thievery (he still had the powercord, so that didn't seem likely). Finally, he hit upon a theory: the MacBook Air was accidentally tossed out with the Sunday paper (if you read the Sunday New York Times you know that it often weighs in at much more than the MacBook Air's 3 pounds). One wonders if he was using one of the many Manilla envelope cases for his MacBook Air. Luckily for Steven, Newsweek will be footing the $1800 bill for the MacBook Air, but chances are should the same thing happen to you, you won't be so fortunate. Make sure to keep an eye on that tiny laptop from Apple, there is no telling where it might end up!

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tmalone writes "The New York Times is reporting that book publishers are beginning to phase out DRM-protected audio books. This month the world's largest publisher, Random House, started offering DRM-free mp3s; Penguin has announced that it will follow suit. Their logic? DRM just doesn't work. 'Publishers, like the music labels and movie studios, stuck to DRM out of fear that pirated copies would diminish revenue. Random House tested the justification for this fear when it introduced the DRM-less concept with eMusic last fall. It encoded those audio books with a digital watermark and monitored online file sharing networks, only to find that pirated copies of its audio books had been made from physical CDs or DRM-encoded digital downloads whose anticopying protections were overridden.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dantwood writes "In an Infoworld article, Dan Tynan writes about the '7 Dirtiest Jobs' in IT. Number three? Enterprise espionage engineer (black ops). 'Seeking slippery individuals comfortable with lying, cheating, stealing, breaking, and entering for penetration testing of enterprise networks. Requirements include familiarity with hacking, malware, and forgery; must be able to plausibly impersonate a pest control specialist or a fire marshal. Please submit rap sheet along with resume.'" Paging Mike Rowe, Mike Rowe to the IT desk. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bfwebster writes "According to a local news article from last week, Kentucky state lawmaker Tim Couch wants to ban anonymous posting on the internet in order to 'cut down on online bullying', which he says has been 'a particular problem in eastern Kentucky.' His bill would require posters to register with their real names and e-mail addresses under threat of fines. Looks like another battle in the right for anonymous free speech." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple announced recently that it would not block third party developers from creating VoIP over Wi-Fi solutions on the iPhone and iPod Touch. However, they noted that the solutions have to work over Wi-Fi and not through the cellular network. This may make sense to VoIP developers anyway because the bandwidth limitations of the cell network make it difficult to develop VoIP on that platform. One company that has made some progress in VoIP development for the iPhone is SightSpeed. They don't have something to offer just yet, though. They are currently facing difficulties because they are a video chat service, not just a voice service, and they have found that the placement of the camera on the iPhone hinders their engineers from full development of their application. They re working on that issue and hoping to be one of the third party developers that sees success in moving their VoIP offerings to the iPhone. read comment(s)

Slashdot is running a thread on Wikileak’s request for a global boycott of eNom, due to their supposed involvement in the recent Wikileaks censorship scare.

In the spirit of opportunism and blatant capitalism that makes the Internets so great, I would like to inform any reader that currently has domains sitting at eNom that I run my own domain registrar company at http://gopedro.net, that our prices are very competitive and we don’t play Mickey Mouse registrar games (accidentally “locking” domains so they can’t be transferred, hard as hell to maintain records, hidden fees) that bulk registrars like eNom and GoDaddy like to play.

Stick it to eNom! Buy your domains from Gopedro.net :-)

Don't forget that Daylight Savings Time for participating areas of the U.S. starts tomorrow, Sunday March 9. DST has always been weird time for me. I lived in Puerto Rico for 21 years, we were on Atlantic time and close enough to the equator that the summer daylight variation is not as extreme as here or in South West Germany. I learned the "Spring Ahead, Fall behind" rule the hard way: on the

Parents of the approximately 200,000 home-schooled children in California are reeling from the possibility that they may have to shutter their classrooms — and go back to school themselves — if they want to continue teaching their own kids. On Feb. 28, Judge H. Walter Croskey of the Second District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles ruled that children ages six to 18 may be taught only by

Filed under: Apple, iPhone

Sun Microsystems is known for many things, but it is probably best known for Java. The promise of Java is that programmers can write an application once and run it on any machine, or device, that has a Java Virtual Machine (a virtual environment that runs on a computer which includes the Java runtime, so that the Java code can run).

That's the promise of Java, sadly, the reality isn't always the same. Java Virtual Machines on different platforms often require special code (which kind of defeats the purpose) and most damning of all (especially on the Mac) is that Java has its own library of UI elements. Unless a Java programmer goes out of their way to make sure their app looks like a native app, it often has an unmistakable 'Java look' to it.

Sun now wants you to have all that Java fun on the iPhone. Shortly after the launch of the iPhone SDK, Sun started looking into the possibility of making a Java VM for the iPhone. After some investigating, they are sure that Java ME (that's the version of Java optimized for mobile devices) on the iPhone is possible and Sun wants to bring it to you. I'm sure there are many Java developers out there are very happy to hear this news.

Thanks, TJ.

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