...more recent posts
Think Secret, a mac rumors website with a very good track record, is reporting that Apple will release a "bare bones, G4-based iMac without a display at Macworld Expo on January 11 that will retail for $499".
The fabled "headless iMac" is one of the longest running debates in the Mac community. Apple has always said they are not interested in pursuing this low margin (sub $800) category. But supposedly iPod sales (and extensive data from their retail stores,) have convinced them they can lure away a lot of windows users with a cheaper entry level machine, and that the economics of "growing the base" make sense in exchange for smaller per unit profits. Could be. I have to admit it doesn't sound like an Apple strategy to me. But I can think of several people to whom I would recommend this machine.
It will be fun to see how this turns out. So far Wall Street is not noticing (Wall St. has wanted Apple to "grow the base" for some time now,) but maybe they don't read the rumor sites. At least there is now some excitement around Macworld 2005. Things had been a little too quiet.
I mentioned this first back in august, and it looks like it is ready now. Tor: an anonymous Internet communication system.
For your Christmas day geek pleasure, a University of Washington video lecture by Urs Hölzle describing the Google Linux Cluster. Some amazing numbers.
The Graphing Calculator is a cool piece of software that shipped with the first PowerPC computer from Apple. "Just type an equation and it is drawn for you without complicated dialogs or commands." The story of it's creation is not so simple though.
I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs." Afterward, they asked, "Who do you report to? What group are you in? Why haven't we seen this earlier?" I explained that I had been sneaking into the building and that the project didn't exist. They laughed, until they realized I was serious. Then they told me, "Don't repeat this story."
Samsung is kicking ass. The soon to be released i730 mobile has everything: huge QVGA display, slide out QWERTY keyboard, 1.3 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, and it works on the EV-DO high speed cellular network. This is what the Treo could have been. But it runs Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Edition. Still, I might have to surrender. Somebody stop me.
Very thorough academic analysis of BitTorrent.
I'm still working on the post where I vent my disappointment with Palm. Sure the Treo 650 is better than the 600, and I loved that mobile. But the times are a changin', and Palm just isn't moving fast enough. I'm starting to doubt they can bring their OS into the 21st century. No, scratch that, I'm in full doubt mode already.
But where does that leave us? It leaves us with Symbian (Nokias, Sony/Ericcson, etc.) and Microsoft (Pocket PC) at the moment. I guess I will have to take a look at these. Of course I am extremely prejudiced against Microsoft (maybe that is silly, but I need to have some beliefs) but their OS seems to be on the best mobile offerings here in the U.S. at the moment.
Witness the new mobile from Verizon: the XV6600. Damn. This is the first phone available on Verizon's EV-DO high speed network (previously they have only been selling wireless PC Cards for notebook data access on this network.) In short, if you live in a place that has EV-DO coverage (NYC, check) this is what you want. And the XV6600 looks to be very powerful. No camera (I guess that is too unbusiness-like,) but everything else makes me jealous. I wish I could play with one for a few days to get a feel for how the Microsoft OS stacks up.
Just stumbled upon this new to me Google service: Google Local. You tell it 'What' (e.g. coffee shops) and "Where" (e.g. Poughkeepsie, N.Y.) and it returns location information. Is this new?
The FCC approved the Sony Ericsson S710a. This will probably be on Cingular, and should be available soon. As far as I know this is the best cameraphone you can get in the U.S. at the moment. Absolutely huge gorgeous screen. And runs on the semi-high speed EDGE network. I'm still waiting, but this one is for sure in the running.
I've been watching this thread over at Treo Central develop with some skepticism. The rather enthusiastic hackers there have been trying to get WiFi to work on the Treo 650. Palms choice to not include WiFi (probably to appease cellular carriers who presumably want you to use their network and not some free WiFi hotspot to send your data, but possibly in an effort to not undermine sales of their Tungsten WiFi PDAs) is one of the great disappointments with the 650. I had thought this quest would not be successful, but it's never very smart to underestimate the resources of a bunch of software engineers with too much time on their hands. And damn, it looks like they have done it. The .prc file you need is hosted here (I have it already if that goes down.)
Just two days ago the lead hacker, Shadowmite, posted:
It's just looking pretty bad... It works, but it's completely unstable and almost impossible to keep it working. We really need to completely re-write the network layers to make this happen, and thus the source code is needed.And then yesterday at 8:00 pm, after much shooting in the dark, he hit it:
I'm not giving up, but it's going to be slow, if any progress at all is made now...
GUYS HOLY FRICKING HECK OF MOTHER BLEH BLEH BLEH! I'M STREAMING SHOUTCAST OVER WIFI!!!!!! WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!1 yOU ALL OWE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111 GFPOIHPOGIHR3O[GIRWHOGIRWHGO42IHF42Of course, there are some problems
oK, INSANITY OVER...
It takes over the network connection/library... COMPLETELY! Once installed, you can not access vision UNTIL you hard reset and get it off the phone... Maybe with some more time we can find a way around that... But I wanted to mention it...So wow. Whether this becomes a big thing or is limited to the serious geek set will be determined by how well they can work out the remaining problems with the net.lib and needing to do a hard reset every time you go back and forth between WiFi and Vision (Vision is Sprint's 1xRTT cellular data service.) But still, seriously good show!