Perilous File History?

I got an invite today at lunch to have lunch tomorrow with the head of World Wide Make IT for TI, who reports to Brian Bonner, CTO of TI. It'll definitely be rather intimidating, but it should be a good meal at least (Texas Land & Cattle). I just wish I didn't have this ulcer inside my cheek, ugh. Microsoft is planning on putting a feature in Vista that would allow you to view past modification on files and when they were made, which would look like it's pretty useful. After all, that's one of the founding principles of CVS for developers. However, someone could also see what files you've permanently erased from your hard drive by looking at the folder's history, which could be a scary thought. Couldn't that result in a rather grievous threat in privacy? At the same time though, if you're ashamed of something you've deleted, then maybe a new feature isn't your biggest problem. And as for your work computer, that's owned by the company after all. They have every right to see what you're creating and deleting on their own machines. I think that as long as you can choose the folders and files this feature is enabled on, it's fairly benign. I can't imagine what a hacker could do with this, unless it's easy for them to write scripts that would automatically undelete deleted files based on this, which I couldn't imagine. If anything, you could now see what files were modified by a virus.

The Linux Extremist has discovered a flaw in the $100 computer plan: what if the purchasers don't actually give the computers to their needy children? In Nigeria, there is a well known scam going around apparently, so what if they got these cheap computers? I just hope that safeguards are put in place to check for their usage, but it is kind of hard to enforce this on 1 million boxes. It was reported earlier today that E3 would soon be toned down because it costs too much for companies and it's too crowded, and that has now been confirmed by the ESA. This is probably a good idea so that more money can be invested in the games and less hype has to be generated, especially since the press can now be more effective at getting this information out faster. The founder of ThinkPad has given his opinions on the future of the laptop and what the ThinkPad, which I never cared for, will do to adapt. I agree about power and performance, but I don't think that he should be downplaying it as a multimedia machine so much. I think we're getting closer to the point where people like TV tuners and portable DVD players. A company called ReadyDrive has been working on a hybrid hard drive with a Flash-based cache, and it can perform faster than your normal hard drive because of this. However, this would definitely make them harder to service, and what do you do if your Flash memory has overstepped its limit of maximum erases? It's just a good overview for this up and coming issue. It's about time to buy textbooks for the Fall (if you want to get them cheap online), and one publishing company is actually offering a free Algebra book! I really wish that this would spread to other Math texts, but I'm sure that won't happen. Lastly, programmers will want to bookmark the recently released Krugle search engine for searching source code in the most popular languages around. I can definitely see myself using this in the very near future for the NSC site.

That still comes from Bobby, and it actually makes Lindsay Lohan look rather classy. You can see other shots over here. The most surprising news today was the announcement of the sequel to Batman Begins being The Dark Knight and Heath Ledger has been confirmed to be The Joker. The title is cool to me, but it'll be hard to publicize it that way, and so I think it'll get changed before it's released to have "Batman" in the title. Nicole Kidman has also been confirmed as the villain in The Golden Compass and will actually move to England since she'll also need to be in the movies for the rest of the trilogy. I think that's great news for the fantasy series. Tim Allen and Tom Hanks are back for Toy Story 3, and they claim the story to be much stronger now. We still don't know what that story is though. We do know the plot of Rambo IV though, and it's pretty bad. I see Stallone's career taking another dive. Lastly, I have a couple of trailers. The first one is just a teaser for The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D re-release, but it's not much. What was really good was the trailer for Babel, which I think almost looks a little too much like Crash, but it has a great idea behind it with some big name actors.

Now for Monday Madness:

1. Do you have a photo blog? If so, feel free to share the link with us!
Nope, sorry.
2. How many pets do you own, and what are their names? If none, have you had a favorite pet in the past?
None, but I always wanted a pet!
3. How many times a week does the carpet in your house get vacuumed? No carpet? How many times a MONTH do your floors get mopped?
Half a time? I only vaccum once every two weeks. Same for the floors: they're usually only mopped once every two months.
4. Which room in your house do you spend the most time in?
Bedroom, where the computer and tv is.
5. Have you read any good books lately?
I wish! I'm trying to get through Carrie though.
6. What is your biggest source of news? (Newspaper? Television? Radio? Other?)
Digg. I let everyone else decide what's important for me to know.