...more recent posts
New PowerMac towers from Apple. Slightly faster with no other major changes. Underwhelming to people who care too much about such things (who you lookin' at?) but in reality a perfectly fine incremental update.
Jobs had promised 3 Ghz within a year when the G5 was introduced last year, and now it's pretty clear that is not going to happen (this update tops out at 2.5 Ghz.) So of course there is much gnashing of teeth over the broken promise. Still, compared to where things were before, with Motorolla and the 167 mhz front side bus (Bwahahahaha!), IBM is doing a bang up job. Aside from bragging rights, I don't think it matters too much whether they are at 2.5 or 3.0.
But I wish they would have done something on the storage side. Why no dual optical drive option? Why only room for two internal hard drives? Why no option for hardware RAID? These are changes they could have implemented that would have placated the geeks. But maybe the geeks don't really matter that much. For almost all real world uses, these machines are fine.
Apple just released a new wireless networking device called AirPort Express. Plug it into an AC outlet and it provides an audio out port for connecting to a stereo as well as an 802.11g router. Now open iTunes on a computer with wireless networking and you can redirect output to any AirPort Express connected stereo within range. Tiny. No hassles. $129. Winner.
Also, it functions as a network extender (bridge) in an existing AirPort Extreme network - just plug it in and it sets itself up.
Finally:
Simeda, based in Bucharest, has ported Rendezvous to the Pocket PC platform and bundled it with a web server. The software automatically discovers other devices on a WiFi network and allows people to stream or share music with just a couple of clicks.
$150 cassette deck for your computer for ripping those old tapes to your hard drive, or dumping mp3 mixes back onto that old standby format.
Cool one wheel scooter design.
Looks like the free VoIP application Skype (from the kazza people - I mentioned it last September) will be coming to OS X. From the Skype forums:
May 18th: In response to all the requests: there WILL be a Skype version for Mac OS X. No info is publicly available about when exactly it will be out, but it's already in the work
May 24th: I will contact you when we have something to send to you, which is not in next week but quite close. Thanks for patient waiting. :-)
For David Stotts, computing needs a new face: yours. He'd like to hook you up to a partner miles or continents away, pipe live video of each of you onto the same computer desktop, and let you hash out your ideas, pointing to work on the screen, hearing each other's voices, and watching each other react....
...The key is transparency, which is wired into today's high-performance graphics hardware. By tapping that capacity and the human brain's ability to organize visual patterns, Stotts and his team found a way to let you peer through transparent images of yourself and your partner at the same time you're watching your work on the screen. (If you've ever looked through your reflection in a pond and noticed a fish swimming under the surface, you'll have the idea.)
Here is way more than you want to know about how web browsers and web servers negotiate their connections, and how the browser parses the resulting data stream into something that looks to you like a page. Written by the guy who leads development of Apple's Safari browser.
There is a lot going on under the hood to make this all happen. <understatement/>