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Metaweb: a Wiki for Neal Stephenson's new novel Quicksilver. (What's a wiki? "The simplest online database that could possibly work.")
Nokia 7600 (page requires flash.) Wow. Very nice to see something a little different.
Nokia is also introducing wearable necklace displays that you can transfer pictures to over IR. Cool idea, although I doubt this will really take off. Two models: here and here. And similarly, the Kaleidoscope. I've wondered before if such a setup could work for reading email and web surfing.
(all links via gizmodo)
Google has a new toy: Search by Location. Here's the FAQ page. This is definitely beta, as I'm getting more server errors than actual results. But I'm sure they will get the bugs ironed out. Definitely cool when it works.
Apple has posted OS X 10.2.8 (for non G5 computers.) This will be the final 10.2 update before Panther (10.3) arrives in the next few months.
But I'm advising people to wait on installing this one as their seems to be some problems with loss of network connectivity for some people. Always safer to let others go first.
Looks like sales of camera phones have outpaced the sales of digital cameras in the first half of '03.
I've been saying this for a long time: the stand alone consumer camera market is doomed. But the handset manufactures still have some progress to make. We're starting to see 1 megapixel units, but we need at least twice that resolution. And, more importantly, we need on the fly variable jpeg compression. I mean: each time you snap a picture you should produce two images. One full size image that gets stored in your phone (and synched to your PC later by bluetooth or cable,) and one smaller (the user can select a target size, say, between 20K and 200K) reduced quality image that can be emailed (or sent via mms) right from the phone immediately. I think this is key. So far I know of no one doing this.
Fastap is a new alpha keyboard layout for cellphones. Very interesting compromise. Intel has some reference designs and we should see production models by the end of the year. Will this finally get Americans text messaging?
On Wednesday there will be an Applescript for system admins webcast featuring Apple's AS guru Sal Soghoian.
Pictures of my new 1,100 dual 2.0 Ghz G5 Mac cluster.
Oh no wait, those are shots of the cluster at Virginia Tech.
Got a chance to play with Alex's new 17 inch Powerbook yesterday. That is one sweet machine. Compared to my 15 inch (last generation titanium,) the 17 inch aluminum is much nicer. The screen is sharper, with (it seemed to me at least) better color. The hinge mechanism for the screen is greatly improved and now glides open fluidly. A real pleasure. And the backlit keyboard is hard not to fall in love with.
This was also my first chance to play with two wireless powerbooks. We had Alex's machine connected to the office router with an ethernet cable. And my machine was wirelessly connected to Alex's through airport. This is very easy, but still not perfectly easy. I could share his internet connection. And my iTunes library automagically showed up in his version of iTunes (and vice versa.) That one is especially impressive.
I can't wait for the first time my iTunes program loads up some unknown iTunes users library when I'm out in public somewhere. Imagine being on a plane flight and having the music library of everyone with a powerbook on the plane suddenly display on your computer. "I wonder which of these people is the big Joy Division fan?" That's going to be fun. Ad hoc local wireless networks. Wi-fi and zeroconf (airport and rendez-vous in apple speak) are going to make the gadget world very interesting.
Still, when I tried to copy over my 17 gigs of, uh, uncopyrighted, uh, historical data (yeah, that's it, Alex and I are *way* into historical data,) we could see the limits of 802.11b 10 mb/sec connections. The highly unreliable time remaining indicator told us we would be waiting 9 days for it to finish. Plugging the machines directly into each other with an ethernet cable (both machines have gigabit/sec ethernet) resulted in the transfer time being knocked down to under 1 hour.
The WSJ's Walt Mossberg loves the Treo 600.