Jonn Berg

Evidently Honda has had a software glitch that has affected Honda and Acura vehicles purchased between April of 2002 and November 2006. When the odometer was running, it could have been as much as 4% fast. That means that your odometer could have been clocking more miles than you have actually driven. For a 15,000 mile lease, that would equal you only driving between 14,400 and 15,000 miles.

It seems that they may have to pay out some money to owners of said vehicles. Endgaget has the story.

I was driving to the Eaglebrook Lino Lakes campus for church this morning when I pulled off of 35E onto 14 and what did I see in front of me? I saw a Toyota Celica police cruiser! I was shocked at first, but other than the fact that the Celica (especially stock) looks ugly, I think it is pretty cool. I would imagine that it is as fast as a Crown Victoria, but it gets at least a 1/3 better gas mileage. The only thing that I can see as a down would be something that my dad told me years ago when I asked him why there were no front-wheel drive police cars. He responded that perhaps the wheels would be too easily knocked out of alignment. It makes sense to me. I think it is an interesting experiment though.

Once I meet someone new and they find out that I am a computer consultant, or if I haven’t seen someone in a while, I have been inevitably getting asked if I would recommend Windows Vista.  I have been testing it out for a few months now and while I generally like it okay, I would have to say that you really need to be wary of it if you don’t have another operating system available. 

If you don’t ever plan to play premium content, music or movies that you have purchased from an online store (like iTunes), then you probably don’t have much to worry about.  If you do want to play that kind of content however, you should run far away from Vista. 

I am mentioning this because of this article by Peter Gutmann.  It gets a little bit technical, but the gist is that there are certain pieces of high-end audio and video hardware that Vista will specifically disable playback on because of the “analog hole” idea.  This idea is that you can play a DRMed mp3 and “record” the sound in between the PC and the sound hardware.  Microsoft’s way around that is to just disable it completely.  I have really over-simplified this so I would recommend reading the original article.