Airlock Locks, Unlocks Your Mac by iPhone

macOS 24 Comments
A clever little Mac utility : "Airlock allows your Mac to lock itself, plain and simple. Using your iPhone or iPod Touch, Bluetooth, and a smidgen of pixie dust, Airlock determines whether you're near your computer. When you leave the room - poof! - your Mac locks itself. "And when I come back?" You guessed it: your Mac unlocks. You can also customize Airlock to perform specific actions as you come and go - have your computer talk to you, log-in or out of iChat, walk the dog, and such."
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Windows’ Scrolling Behaviour: Really, Really Annoying

Graphics 108 Comments
For as long as I can remember, I've been having issues with scrolling in Windows and its applications. When scrolling via dragging the scroll blob, it seemed as if Windows had the annoying habit of randomly resetting your scroll blob to its starting position, which irritated me to no end. It took me a while to figure out, but I finally know when this behaviour occurs - now I just need to know: why?!
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Chrome’s Close Tab Behaviour Analysed

Google 16 Comments
"Tabs, tabs, tabs. The specialist subject of UI experts everywhere. Should tabs just rearrange horizontally or also detach? How much vertical scroll buffer should a tab have before it detaches? Under what circumstances should it detach? What about reattaching? This is a short piece concerned only with the different behaviours when closing tabs in Google Chrome, as I think these behaviours are fantastically thought through."
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Storing Your Data on the Internet: Ignorant and Silly

Editorial 112 Comments
Now that everything is moving to the cloud internet, you might think that data loss is a thing of the past. Sadly, as the past few months have taught us, this actually isn't true; we first had the Microsoft/Danger disaster, and now we have Palm and Sprint facing a class-action lawsuit over data loss for webOS phones. All this raises the question: how safe is it to store your precious data on the internet, and do you really trust the internet?
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Microsoft Merges Windows Server, Azure Divisions

Microsoft 10 Comments
"In a much anticipated move, Microsoft has created the Server & Cloud Division within the Server & Tools Business that merges the Windows Azure and the Windows Server & Solutions groups. The move shows that Azure isn't just an advanced development project for the software giant, and the company is ready to make money from it. Microsoft says its strategy is to create 'a single organization focused on delivering solutions for customers that span on-premises data centers and the cloud'. Windows Server, Windows Azure, SQL Server, SQL Azure, Visual Studio, and System Center are all part of this strategy that includes both on-premises and cloud solutions. Microsoft notes it is the only company in the industry that can offer its customers the choice to tap into a server platform, a cloud platform, or both."
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Apple Launches RSS Feed for iPhone Developer News

Apple 2 Comments
"Apple announced an RSS feed for iPhone developers, opening a communication channel for news and announcements surrounding the App Store. Although the App Store has proven a considerable success for Apple, currently hosting more than 100,000 apps, its size and exponential growth have led to outsider calls for more proactive regulation, including the weeding-out of useless apps and fake positive reviews. Apple also announced that iTunes Connect, a tool for managing applications and accessing reports, will be offline from Dec. 23 to Dec. 28."
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Icaros Desktop 1.2 Released

Amiga & AROS 11 Comments
AROS distribution Icaros Desktop v1.2 has been released. AROS is a lightweight, portable and independent operating system aiming to recreate the original AmigaOS experience on any platform and, after many years of development, has finally reached a good degree of reliability. Icaros Desktop provides a full, already pre-configured Amiga-like desktop environment on any PC, packing it with many useful or entertaining applications, games and so on.
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Thunderbird 3 Released

Mozilla, Gecko 36 Comments
Mozilla has released Thunderbird 3. You can read the release notes, or download the darn thing. "If you like Firefox's tabbed browsing, you're going to love tabbed email. Thunderbird 3's tabbed email lets you load emails in separate tabs so you can quickly jump between them. Search results open in a new tab too. New tools like our timeline and filtering tools will help you pinpoint the email you're looking for, whether it’s the one from yesterday, last month, or several years ago."
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Canadian Recording Industry Faces Massive Infringment Claims

Legal 23 Comments
And we have news of yet another massive copyright infringement lawsuit in the music industry. This one takes place in Canada, and the infringed party is placing a truly massive claim on the infringing party: 50 million USD, with the possibility of it exceeding 60 billion USD. Bad news? Well, no, not really - you really need to consider the infringing party in this one. This is irony not even the ancient Greeks could imagine.
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Building the Dream Google Smartbook

Google 2 Comments
InfoWorld's Mel Beckman conjectures on the functionality necessary to make the Google 'smartbook dream' a reality, prioritizing the features any smartphone/netbook hybrid would require to succeed. From multitouch, to SSDs, to dual-boot capabilities, the list goes beyond what early Android-based entrants have to offer but remains within the realm of possibility, especially if Google CEO Eric Schmidt's hints at a future Chrome/Android OS convergence come to fruition.
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One Third of Netbooks Ship with Linux

  Submitted by Yama Hardware 156 Comments
We've seen a lot of reports going back and forth about whether or not Linux is doing well in the netbook space. As it turns out, research firm ABI Research as well as Dell say about one third of their machines ship with Linux pre-installed - which is pretty darn impressive.
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Google Acquires AppJet

  Submitted by drstorm Google No Comments
AppJet Inc. is the company behind EtherPad, a real-time collaboration tool somewhat similar to Google's own Wave. More about the acquisition here. Naturally, EtherPad team will be working on improving Wave in the future. The original plan was to discontinue the EtherPad, but because of user demand, Google decided to keep EtherPad online at least until its code is published as open-source. It was not originally planed to release the code either, but it was decided that it would be a fair compensation to EtherPad users. More about this here.
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The Machine SID Duplication Myth

  Submitted by bzsparks Windows 3 Comments
In usual form, Mark Russinovich debunks the machine SID duplication myth. " The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that machine SID duplication – having multiple computers with the same machine SID – doesn’t pose any problem, security or otherwise. I took my conclusion to the Windows security and deployment teams and no one could come up with a scenario where two systems with the same machine SID, whether in a Workgroup or a Domain, would cause an issue."
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Google Announces New Location-based Services

Wireless 10 Comments
Google had a media event at the Computer History Museum today to announce new mobile computing services, and seem to have brought to light the kind of "jetpack and flying car" futuristic functionality that mobile computing aficionados have been talking about for years. I'm sure it will all be a little creaky at first, but today may prove to be an important mobile computing landmark.
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