Eideard

 
Dream Cheeky‘s missile launchers fit a useful niche in the modern office. Artillery.

You can attack your cubicle competitors from six feet away or 6,000 miles. The “Storm” can be controlled over the Internet. A side-mounted webcam lets you view – and determine your target.

Mac users are more politically liberal, more urban, younger and more educated than their PC-using counterparts, according to a new survey by affinity aggregator Hunch.

The results of a survey of 388,315 Hunch users posted Friday in Hunch’s visually arresting style identified 52 percent of respondents as self-described PC people, 25 percent as users of Apple’s Macintosh computers and 23 percent as neither. Hunch cross-referenced those results with dozens of other questions it asks users to answer.

The details of the findings seem to fall along the lines that many people would have had a, well, hunch about in the first place. Mac users are chic, design-oriented and like hummus and San Pelligrino. PC users get around in jeans and chase down patty melts with Pepsi or Orange Crush…

Among the more provocative findings:

► 58 percent of Mac people are “liberal,” as compared to 38 percent of PC people
► 67 percent of Mac people have completed a four-year college degree or higher, as compared to just 54 percent of PC people
► 52 percent of Mac people live in a city, while PC people are 18 percent more likely than Mac people to live in the suburbs and 21 percent live in rural areas
► Mac people throw a lot more parties than PC people
► Mac people are more confident about their verbal abilities but less confident about their math abilities than PC people
► Mac people are more likely to see random people as “similar,” whereas PC people are more likely to see them as “different”.

There are dozens of articles spinning the Hunch data. I admit I chose this one just for the headline – to bust the chops of the few family members who haven’t yet left the Wonderful World of Windows.

Here’s the original study.

No more Windows!
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google’s Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google, which employs more than 10,000 workers internationally.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

“Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks,” said another.

New hires are now given the option of using Apple’s Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system…

Employees wanting to stay on Windows required clearance from “quite senior levels”, one employee said. “Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,” said another employee…

The move created mild discontent among some Google employees, appreciative of the choice in operating systems granted to them – an unusual feature in large companies. But many employees were relieved they could still use Macs and Linux. “It would have made more people upset if they banned Macs rather than Windows,” he added.

Phew!

I admit it: I’m a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can’t control it. It’s Apple. I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER…

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.

RTFA. Witty, bright, insightful on many levels – even if Charlie Brooker doesn’t answer all of his own questions.

Apple Boutique in Best Buy

Wal-Mart’s move to overhaul the electronics departments in many of its retail stores with Apple-designated shopping areas is being seen as a sign that the mega-retailer is making a pitch to eventually carry Apple’s line of Mac personal computers.

The Bentonville, Arkansas-based discounter began revamping the electronics departments in approximately 3,500 of its stores this week — including 2,600 Supercenter locations — in a bid to capitalize on a large slice of the big-screen TV market vacated by Circuit City, which shut down its operations after filing for bankruptcy in November.

As part of the renovations, which should provide for a more spacious and interactive shopping experience, Wal-Mart will also be rolling out specialized in-store boutiques for popular brands such and Nintendo and Apple, similar to the Apple store-within-a-store layouts found in Best Buy retail stores.

Ben Reitzes, an analyst with Barclays Capital, sees the move as a precursor to Wal-Mart extending its reach beyond iPods, iPhones, and accessories to Apple’s Mac line of computers.

“We believe Wal-Mart is actively pitching Apple to carry more products,” he said. “With Wal-Mart improving its retail displays, we believe that the mega-retailer could eventually earn the right to sell select Mac products without diluting Apple’s brand…”

That said, the analyst doesn’t see the existing Mac line as a particularly good fit for the discount retailer outside of the $599 Mac mini and $999 MacBook offerings, but said he believes the company is working on more sub-$1000 products that may eventually appeal to Wal-Mart’s customer base.

This caused more discussion – online and over a cuppa – among my investing guru friends than anything else happening this morning. No – I won’t tell you what we decided. The last thing I want is for this “diarist” to become an analyst.

Apple has taken the bait and replied to Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” ads. The Latest Get a Mac spot, called “Elimination”, spoofs the MS campaign which searches out cheap PCs which superficially look like they have the same specs as a particular Mac. As ever, the Apple ad comes down to viruses, and — as ever — John Hodgman’s PC is hilarious.

The claims of both sides’ advertisements are bending the truth somewhat, but that’s really not the point here. For the observer, watching the two sides virtually bitch-slapping each other is tremendous entertainment.

My take is the humor. My favorite kind of advertising. Apple wins this one hands down.

Shortly after updating a security bulletin recommending widespread use of antivirus software on Macs, Apple took it down. The action reflects the company’s confidence in the security of Mac OS X — confidence that is, for the most part, well-founded.

“We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate,” Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld. “The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box.”

The bulletin was receiving a lot of media attention, and many bloggers theorized that Apple was implying Mac OS X is now more vulnerable to viral attack. In response, Apple removed the bulletin Tuesday to dispel such unsubstantiated speculation.

But then, the company is on fairly solid ground in asserting the relative safety of OS X. The debate of which OS is more secure — Mac OS X or Windows — is stale and getting more trivial each year. It’s clear that Apple has won the security game, given the diminutive number of viruses, Trojans and bots for Mac compared to Windows.

Even as Apple’s market share continues to get bigger, I have doubts that Mac OS X’s security is suddenly going to go haywire. The benefit of Apple’s tight control over its operating system and hardware is the ability it gives the company to implementing effective, reliable security measures.

So I’m going to go out on a limb here and say to my fellow journalists: Can we stop freaking out about the storm until it actually happens? Right now it’s barely even sprinkling.

Chen’s article will break the heart of anti-fanboys. Not that it will slow the sky-is-falling babble.

Computer security firms are warning about an attack that hijacks the clipboard where copied text is stored.

The attack puts a hard-to-delete weblink into the clipboard that, if followed, leads people to a website selling fake security software.

The code that inserts the link has been found in flash-based adverts seen on many legitimate websites. The attack on the clipboard has hit both Windows and Mac users of the Firefox web browser.

It seems to work by exploiting Adobe Flash files used to make display adverts in such a way as to endlessly flush the clipboard of other text and constantly re-insert the malicious link in its place.

Getting rid of the link has proved problematic. Some report resorting to re-booting their machine to free themselves of it but others stopped it by killing the Firefox process thread.

Sounds especially dangerous for diarist bloggers. Like me. Though I haven’t run into it, yet.

I do most of my searching, cutting and pasting, using Safari. But, I review the blogs I edit/write for – using Firefox as a matter of course to check on technical readability.