Steve Ballmer is an idiot

Continuing in his usual path of lying, copycat, bumble-fumble stupidity, Microsoft douche bag Steve Balmer came out officially against an Apple product--the new iPhone. No, say it ain't so! This doofus wouldn't have a product if Apple hadn't been there for him to pirate in the early days of M$ Windows. As a matter of fact, M$ hates every Apple product that they openly plagiarize.

And for a company that sells Windbloze for as much as his does, he has a lot of room to talk about the iPhone in terms of price. The fact he leaves out in his interview is that the iPhone is MORE than just a phone, so it's going to sell great! I'm sure he isn't going to be happy about it, since Apple is out-innovating Microsoft any day of the week.

How easy is it to hack into someone's Mac?

As it turns out, it's entirely possible to hack into a VERY secured Mac, even if it has an open firmware password established. However, it would take an extremely savvy thief to know about this. Best thing to do is STILL use OFPW, and be certain to secure your Mac physically too!

Tech Press » How to Hack a Tiger Admin Account:

If the person has PHYSICAL access to the machine, then an open-firmware password will do little to prevent them from gaining access — you can disable the open-firmware password by adding/removing a significant amount of RAM, then immediately zapping the PRAM upon the next boot. That procedure removes the open-firmware password.

The machine needs to be locked down physically as well as have software security measures in place in order to thwart potential malicious users.

iPhone: iPod going bye-bye?

Once the storage comes up a bit on the new iPhone, why would anyone pay basically the same for an iPod when they can have all that’s in the iPhone and still retain iPod functionality? Apple was very smart to do this. Everyone is hooked on iPods, and folks will now see this as the next step towards being rid of separate PDAs, phones, mp3 players, etc.

I think you’re going to see other phone service providers (i.e., Alltel, Sprint, etc.) start tap dancing soon for a piece of this, or I think their business will be hurt if they don’t.

The first lawsuit has already been filed!

We'll see what happens with the new AppleTV product; I've been saying this would happen for years (i.e., the amalgamation of all "tele-" products in one unit). Soon, the TV, receiver, computer, phone, video, etc. will all be part of one unit, or at least networked and interoperable in the home. Visits to the video store (or even renting through Netflix) will be a thing of the past; video purchases and rentals will all be done "on-line" much the same way music is now bought. This is really already happening on a small scale.

Mail.app suddenly crashing on open

A bizarre, inexplicable problem hit me this morning. I suddenly had no Mail.app. Everything appeared fine, and I even managed to answer one email. The rest of my emails gave me some message about needing to be downloaded from the server (something I have never seen before). I did some digging and found this awesome trick to use when encountering similar Mail.app problems.

Basically, find:

~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

Rename it to:

~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index.bak

Restart Mail and let it reload your messages. All was fine after that!