The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) has the authority to search, copy contents or seize a notebook computer or mobile phone when travelers re-enter the U.S. Various groups have sought scrutiny of the practice in order to protect corporate private data and are also concerned about the economic impact. The Senate Judiciary Committee is…
John Martellaro
John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. With degrees in astrophysics (B.S.) and physics (M.S.), he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include chess, science fiction and astronomy. John is the host of the TMO podcast Background Mode.
Articles by John Martellaro
SecureMac Documents Mac OS X Trojan Horse
SecureMac has posted an advisory about a Mac OS X Trojan Horse that exploits a vulnerability in the Apple Remote Desktop Agent and allows the malware to run as root. The vulnerability is rated critical. The Trojan Horse runs hidden on the system and allows a malicious user complete remote access to the system. It…
Psystar Announces Two New Servers with OS X Server Option [UPDATED]
Psystar has announced two new rack-mount servers. The 1U OpenServ 1100 has an Intel Xeon Harpertown CPU (2.5 GHz) Quad core processor in the base configuration and four drive bays. The 2U OpenServ 2400 has six drive bays. OSes supported include Microsoft Server 2003/2008, CentOS, Ubuntu Server, and Mac OS X Leopard Server. The default…
NVIDIA Unleashes GeForce GTX 200 Series GPUs
NVIDA has unveiled its most powerful graphics processing units (GPU), the GeForce GTX 280 and 260. The GTX 280 has 240 multi-threaded cores and can process video 18 times faster than the latest CPUs. It has 1.4 billion transistors and is capable of nearly a teraflop. Rendering 3D images in realtime is just about the…
Khronos Compute Working Group Evaluating Apple's OpenCL
The Khronos Group announced on Monday that they will form a Compute Working Group to create open standards for parallel computing across multiple GPUs and CPUs. Members include AMD, Apple, Freescale, NVIDIA and IBM. Apple has presented its OpenCL specification to the group. The Compute Working Group will “create royalty-free, open standards for programming heterogeneous…
AMD Announces OpenCL Compatible Teraflop Graphics Card
At the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden Germany on Monday, AMD announced its FireStream 9250 graphics card which breaks the one teraflop barrier for single precision computations. The card occupies a single PCI slot and draws 150 watts. Developers have reported up to a 55x performance increase on financial analysis codes compared to processing on…
WWDC Feels All New Again
WWDC has had pretty much the same flavor for the last 15 years, having been mostly about the Mac. This yearis keynote made it perfectly clear: the Next Big Thing has arrived and consists of a new major platform, the iPhone, a new generation of iPhone developers and new Apple leaders. The air was electric…
Firefox 3 RC2 Release Imminent, with Minor Tweaks
The Mozilla Group announced on Wednesday that they have elected to release RC2 of Firefox 3 prior to the final releases expected in mid-June. The release has just a few additional fixes since RC1 and should be posted some time on Wednesday. “The Firefox 3 development team has decided to produce a new Release Candidate…
Ballmer: Buy Vista, Downgrade to XP for Free
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, responding to a question about the support for XP off the shelf, said that customers can buy Vista, then downgrade to XP for free. “I don’t know how you can do better than getting both,” Mr. Ballmer said Tuesday in Washington D.C. According to InformationWeek on Wednesday, Mr. Ballmer’s comments suggest…
Microsoft Advises Windows Users to Restrict Use of Safari
Microsoft has officially responded to the discovery of a “blended threat,” the design of Safari that allows a malicious Website to download and clutter the user’s download space with a myriad of unwanted files. The is the so-called “Carpet Bomb” effect. While Microsoft’s Security Response Center is working on the problem with Apple and is…
Leopard 10.5.3 Brings Sync with Google Contacts
Apple’s release of OS X Leopard 10.5.3 Update last week now allows users to sync their Mac OS X Address Book with Google Contacts. “We’re happy to tell you that starting today, [May 28] it’s easier to sync up your contact lists. The Address Book application in Mac OS X 10.5.3 now lets iPhone users…
Next Generation 15-inch LCDs: 15.6 inches and 16 x 9
LCD panel makers are pushing for a slight adjustment to the 15-inch class LCD used in notebook computers. Instead of 15.4 inches and 16 x 10, the new panels scheduled for late Q2 or early Q3 will be 15.6 inches and 16 x 9, according to DigiTimes on Wednesday. The primary advantage is the geometry…
Special Notebook Cases Will Ease Airport Security Hassles
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is close to a new policy that will allow notebook computers to remain inside some special types of cases as they go through airport X-ray machines. New cases are being developed by Targus and Skooba. The policy could go into into effect in a few months, according to TSA chief…
Forrester Research: Apple will Colonize the Household
Forrester Research looked into the future and came up with some logical predictions about where Apple is going with its products. The vision was that Apple would be colonizing various rooms in the household in the year 2013. The first item envisioned, according to Nick Wingfield at the Wall Street Journal, is a wall-mounted display…
AAPL Down Dramatically for No Obvious Reasons
Appleis stock (AAPL) dropped nearly US$8.00 on Wednesday for no obvious reasons, according to Barronis. It could be nothing more than profit taking in an ugly market. The news about Apple on Wednesday was minor: a lawsuit over the name “Mighty Mouse” and the fact that the company will use LED backlighting in future notebook…
ForeSee Survey: Apple, Newegg and H-P Lead in Online Satisfaction
In the ForeSee Results Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index published today, Apple, Newegg and HP provided the best online experience of the electronics e-retailers. A copy of the report was obtained by TMO. “The Web continues to be a bright spot in retail, which is good news for retailers and even better news for…
Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 3 Alpha
The Mozilla group has released an alpha of its Thunderbird e-mail program for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. New in this version for Mac is the long-awaited integration with the Mac OS X Address Book. The early release is for testing only. “This release does not represent the final product. Some of the features…
CW: Nine Apps to Tweak the Look of Leopard
Some of the interface changes in Leopard were controversial, so it didnit take long for developers to create apps that can tweak the Leopard look-and-feel, either back to Tiger or just something new, according to Computerworld on Wednesday. While some changes have traditionally required command-line trickery that can cause concern for some users, a new…
RIM's Empire Strikes Back at Apple
RIM knows itis in a battle, a two horse race, with Appleis iPhone. The new BlackBerry Bold is RIMis latest weapon in the war, according to the Wall Street Journal on Monday. [Subscription required.] RIMis new smartphone, designed to fend off the iPhone assault, runs on the higher speed 3G network, adds processing punch and…
C|Net: Remote Possibilities for Apple
Apple has tackled a lot of consumer products that just havenit been friendly enough for the everyday consumer and made them gems of design, excellence and ease of use. Appleis next move might be the wireless remote control, according to C|Net on Tuesday. For example, Appleis iPod click wheel married two different sets of controls…
Installing Windows XP SP3 for VM Users
The PC world has been eagerly waiting for the final release of Window XP, Service Pack 3 (SP3). However, Mac users who plan to install it in their virtualization environment should know that Microsoft has tested the service pack under those conditions as well. Planning for the upgrade, however, is little different than installing on…
Microsoft Resumes Distribution of Windows XP SP3
Microsoft announced on Tuesday that they have resumed the availability of Windows XP SP3 at the Microsoft Download Center. Distribution was halted last week when a last minute incompatibility with Vista SP1 and the Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) software was discovered. Microsoft has published a hotfix for the RMS issue and advised that it…
Macnification Manages Digital Electron Microscopy Workflow
announced the launch and immediate availability of Macnification on Tuesday. The new software allows the scientist to import, organize, find, annotate, analyze, adjust, compare, visualize and publish microscopic images. “All major image file formats can be imported into Macnification, in addition to many proprietary formats including e.g. Gatan Digital Micrograph (dm3), JEOL SEM images (tiff…
Apple's Cash Hoard Rivals Microsoft's
Apple has more cash on hand than Google and IBM and is second only to Microsoft, according to a story at seattlepi on Monday. While Microsoft’s cash has dwindled due to dividends and share buy backs, Apple’s has steadily grown. In fact, Apple has more cash than Hewlett-Packard and Dell combined. The trend, according to…