Macworld, the annual tech gathering for the Apple faithful in San Francisco, opens with a cloud hanging over it.

In a surprise move, the company recently shocked fans by announcing this year’s event is its last.

It also revealed that chief executive Steve Jobs would not present the keynote address, reigniting speculation his health has deteriorated following pancreatic cancer surgery in 2004.

Some analysts, however, see Mr Jobs’ decision as part of a succession plan.

Mac Nerds Make Sadface

The Home Office has signed up to an EU strategy against cybercrime that “encourages” police across Europe to remotely access personal computers.

The plan has sparked fears that the government is looking to increase police powers to hack into people’s computers without a court warrant.

UK police already do a “small number” of such operations under existing law.

However, the Home Office said the EU agreement would not affect police behaviour and was not legally binding.

The plan, drawn up by the Council of the European Union, makes broad statements on how to improve European cyber crime-fighting, including inviting countries to introduce remote searches if they are already provided for under national law.

Fj33r d4 p0L1C3

“BBC has an interesting article on the long-standing issue of how to power the ‘climber’ that would ascend a space elevator into space. Previous ideas have included delivering microwave or laser power to the climber beamed from the Earth’s surface, but now European Space Agency ground station engineer Age-Raymond Riise has demonstrated a device that could provide a “lift into space” for cheaper space missions along a 100,000-km long tether anchored to the Earth. Riise demonstrated sending power mechanically by providing carefully timed jerks of the cable at its base with a broomstick to represent the cable held in tension, an electric sander to provide a rhythmic vibration to the bottom of the stick, and three brushes representing the climber with their bristles pointing downwards allowing the climber assembly to slide upward along the broomstick as it moved slightly downward, but grip it as it moved slightly upward. ‘It would be possible to make a suspension system that completely decouples the cabin where the passengers are,’ says Riise. ‘For them it would be a linear movement with very little disturbance.’ Riise says that he has been approached by commercial elevator companies, who are researching new ideas for elevators in superscrapers where the simplicity of the approach makes it attractive when compared to other ideas for powering lifts, such as compressed air.”

I’m Waiting for the Space Escalator…

“The Milky Way is spinning much faster and has 50 per cent more mass than previously believed. This means the Milky Way is equivalent in size to our neighbor Andromeda — instead of being the little sister in the local galaxy group, as had been believed. One implication of this new finding is that we may collide with Andromeda sooner than we had thought, in 2 or 3 billion years instead of 5.”

The Milky Way, “Kiss My Black Mass Earth”

Although I suppose, technically speaking, everyone at OStatic should use the G1 smartphone with its open source platform, some of us really love our BlackBerrys. You already know Kristin uses Funambol to sync contacts and calenders with the desktop, but tethering the BlackBerry to a laptop takes an entirely different approach.

Barry, created by open source software vendor Net Direct, lets you not only sync your contacts and calendar but also use your smartphone as a computer modem. Sure, it’s not as fast as T1 or cable, but you can’t beat it if you’re stuck somewhere with no Internet access.

Blackberry modem link on linux? Sign us up!

THE CITY HAS always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.
Stop hurting my brain CITY!!

In Apple’s newest set of innovations they have decided to go against the standard keyboard used for more then 50 years and replaced it with a giant wheel. The wheel is similar to what is used on iPod devices and shows no chance of actually being able to input text. A risky move for Apple, but we are guessing a heard of Apple groupies will be buying into this as well!

Gotta love theonion.com for creating the best news on earth and everywhere else!

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.

Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.

A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.

Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.

The cpuset(2) system call and cpuset(1) command have been added, providing an API for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and assignment.

KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.

DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures

WOOT WOOT BSD!!

“Doctors think they have found the cause: a hormone imbalance that has been robbing me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy,” said Mr Jobs.

Apple’s board said it was giving him “complete and unwavering support”.

Mr Jobs, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, has appeared increasingly gaunt at public appearances, sparking rumours about his health.

Speculation has intensified since December, after Apple said Mr Jobs would not be making his annual keynote address at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.

God’s Way of Saying, “Give My iPhone Cut ‘n Paste”

A system which automatically slows down cars to the speed limit could help save lives, according to a government report.

The device uses satellite positioning to check its location and when the speed exceeds the limit, power is reduced and the brakes are applied if necessary.

Slow car sales expected…