Cody Taylor

“Yeah, I said it. The Windows 7 taskbar is the most important Windows UI change since Windows 95, and it will dramatically change the way you use Windows. And it’s better than the Mac’s Dock.”

Despite all the fanfare about the new, upgraded unibody MacBooks, the old (polybody?) MacBooks are still on sale for 9. Thankfully, Apple has updated the base specs on our sad, white friend.

The National Journal just published an article with details about the hacking of Congress in 2006, possibly by agents in China, though the attack’s origin is uncertain. The article notes the difficult work of the House Information Systems Security Office, which must set security policies and then try to enforce them on a population of the equivalent of C-level executives. The few members who have called attention to the issue of Congressional cyber-security have been advised to shut up about it, by whom the reporter did not discover. “Armed with this information about how the virus worked, the security officers scanned the House network again. This time, they found more machines that seemed to match the profile — they, too, were infected. Investigators found at least one infected computer in a member’s district office, indicating that the virus had traveled through the House network and may have breached machines far away from Washington. Eventually, the security office determined that eight members’ offices were affected; in most of the offices, the virus had invaded only one machine, but in some offices, it hit multiple computers. It also struck seven committee offices, including Commerce; Transportation and Infrastructure; Homeland Security; and Ways and Means; plus the Commission on China, which monitors human rights and laws in China.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last night I laser-etched the top of my Eee PC with the complete level maps of Super Mario Land. Everything from the familiar layouts of 1-1 to the climactic battle with Tatanga in the clouds at the end of 4-3 is represented in the etching.