A revealing article on formatting filesystems using DiskUtility indicates that things may not go as well as I had hoped for (or planned).

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I deleted a 700MB file and I accidently picked "Secure Delete Trash". Well, the CPU meter red-lined (I run MenuMeters) and stayed that way for a while. After about a minute, I realized what I had done and decided to cancel the delete, but the Delete dialog wouldn't respond when I clicked on the X. The laptop still remained responsive though. So I switched to Terminal and ran top and found that 72.4% of the CPU was used by an application called Locum. After about 8 minutes, the secure delete completed.

I decided to do a bit of research for Locum and found a great explanation from a Googler called Greg Miller, who even points to the word's etymology.

That's the most fun I've had talking out the trash.

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However, what the current Macbooks are missing is support for BluRay (read and writetable) discs even though I refuse to pay $30 for a Bluray movie (I even refuse to buy a DVD that costs more than $10 now). I think buying a latop today with a lifetime of 5+ years requires BD support. I think Apple prefers people to buy HD video via iTunes rather than media so I don't know when BD drives will appear in Macs.

I'm waiting to see if the Tablet is released in October and I think I can wait until January to see what the new Macbooks will offer.

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The rendering is missing a video camera in the frame.

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He gave up in frustration and called me asking how to do it. So I sat down and tried to do the same thing and Googled for instructions on how to do it and also got frustrated.

We decided that we were doing something wrong because two hours later we still hadn't gotten any further. And I said something like, "We must be doing something wrong because Apple would have thought of this as people buy new Macs everyday and transfer their files and settings from their old Macs on to the new one."

And then I realized that we were going about it the wrong way. We should have been using Migration Assistant! And once we used it all worked out perfectly.

I think Time Machine needs to have some sort of setting that lets users restore an entire computer.

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The Tablet (or Slate), which may or may not be announced on January 26 and which may or may not ship in April, will be the Next Big Thing: 9 years after the first iPod was announced in 2001.

It's predicted to have a 10 inch LCD touch-screen and a camera. No one has mentioned voice-recognition as input. That is my one prediction and wish for this device.

I know my rule about not buying first versions of Apple products but I think I'll buy this device since I've been waiting since 2005 for this thing to appear.

Update Wed Jan 13 22:03:09 2010: The latest rumours say it won't have a camera. That just means instead of buying two tablets, I would buy just one.

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I was going to buy an iPad for my parents this month, but now with the postponement, I will delay my purchase until, at least July and first see what the iPod Touch upgrade will look like in June. I might even skip the first version of the iPad because of Google's announcement...

When Google announced that they would open source the video codec from On2, I began having second thoughts about buying an iPad (or, at least, the limited usefulness of the current iPad). H264 decoding is done in hardware by the iPad, so if Apple accepted the codec, it would need to design a new asic to handle it.

If Apple announces their acceptance before next Spring (when iPad 2 will be released), then the current iPad becomes obsolete for playing video as most of the internet will move to the Google codec which will become the standard.

Something which was a foregone conclusion before yesterday, now becomes very complex when the near future is taken into consideration.

I was looking at least 5 years (approx. $100/year) of use for my iPad (Apple prefers 2.5 years before it's "not supported"). If Apple decides to postpone choosing an alternative code for another 2 years, it's still not enough of an incentive for me to buy and iPad.

Alternatively, Apple could also support both the H264 and the Google codec in hardware. That is a possibility which makes my iPad purchase more palatable.

And yes, I know I'm breaking rule no.1 of not buying first generation Apple products— I wasn't expecting to pay that heavy a price (quick obsolesence), though.

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