Linked List: April 20, 2009

Monday, 20 April 2009

60 Minutes on Cold Fusion 

Intriguing report by Scott Pelley suggesting that cold fusion, discredited 20 years ago, might be real. (Via Dave Winer.)

Apple released four new “Get a Mac” TV commercials, including one called “Legal Copy” wherein everything Hodgman’s PC character says is accompanied by on-screen legal small print. MacJournals has done the yeoman’s work of transcribing the small print in its entirety.

MacJournals observes that much of the text applies to any computer — Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever — but it might as well be lorem ipsum gibberish given how small it’s printed on screen.

Pot vs. Alcohol 

Retired Seattle police chief Norm Stamper:

Over the past four years I’ve asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When’s the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I’m talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When’s the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches.

Tweetie for Mac 1.0 

My favorite iPhone Twitter client is now my favorite Mac Twitter client — free of charge with ads (from Fusion), or $15 for a full license. Tweetie for Mac is not, of course, a “port” of Tweetie for iPhone, but it is infused with a certain iPhone-esque sensibility. There is much to like about Tweetie for Mac, but what I like best is that it is visually quiet. Most of the new desktop Twitter clients I’ve checked out try to show more at once. Twitter by its nature is inherently distracting; I want a client that doesn’t exacerbate it.

Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems 

Ashlee Vance, reporting for the NYT:

The Oracle Corporation, the technology information company, announced Monday that it would acquire a rival, Sun Microsystems, for $9.50 a share, or about $7.4 billion. […]

The deal immediately disrupts the traditional relationships formed between some of the technology industry’s largest players and thrusts Oracle into the hardware business. Oracle, for example, has long-standing partnerships with Sun’s rivals, including Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

I wonder if Oracle cares about Sun’s hardware business. And I wonder what this means for MySQL. This makes more sense to me than IBM buying Sun, though.