...more recent posts
AFP548 is a site I just found geared toward Mac OS X Server administrators. The forums are amazingly good.
More annoying Mac boosterism, this time from Paul Graham. Of course I don't find it annoying, and what's more, he's right :-)
All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get....
...If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they're doing, you'll be doing.
In the matter of "platforms" this tendency is even more pronounced, because novel software originates with great hackers, and they tend to write it first for whatever computer they personally use. And software sells hardware. Many if not most of the initial sales of the Apple II came from people who bought one to run VisiCalc. And why did Bricklin and Frankston write VisiCalc for the Apple II? Because they personally liked it. They could have chosen any machine to make into a star.
If you want to attract hackers to write software that will sell your hardware, you have to make it something that they themselves use. It's not enough to make it "open." It has to be open and good.
And open and good is what Macs are again, finally.
But this has been clear for a while in terms of Apple. Lately I've noticed that Yahoo! is also beginning to attract a different (although somewhat overlapping) crowd of alpha geek web developers through the same method: being open and good. I wonder if their fortunes will follow similarly?
Drunkenblog interview with Jonathan 'The Wolf' Rentzsch, uber 1337 OS X programmer. Pretty technical but really interesting.
I just love the way really good programmers express themselves. It seems like it is almost always the case that the best of the best are also the most humble.
John Carmack, father of Quake, and the most well known graphics programmer in the world, has a few thoughts on writing games in java for cellphones. I always find it interesting to read what he has to say. Short version: games on cellphones pretty much suck (but it's a little more interesting than that.)
I'm still waiting to jump on EV-DO and already we are seeing signs of the new new thing: HSDPA (High Speed Download Packet Access.) Here's an HSDPA handset built by LG for Cingular. According to Engadget:
The LG people were crazy tight-lipped about this one, but the phone was listed as having a maximum download speed of 1.8Mbps (384Kbps up), a built-in multimedia player that can handle all sorts of audio and video formats (H.263, H.264, MPEG4, WMV, MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA), and support for video and music on demand. Cingular is already testing HSDPA in a few places right now, and from what we're hearing they’re probably going to commence their nationwide rollout right around the end of the year, with more and more cities to be added throughout 2006.Mmmm. 1.8 Mb/s. Now that is some serious speed. And from what I understand HSDPA can go even faster than that although, yeah, we'll see when they actually roll out the networks. I'll be surprised if anything actually happens by the end of this year. Still it's nice to know the future is happening somewhere.
Yahoo! 360 is Yahoo!'s soon to be released blogging / social network tool. Marc Canter has a little more info (since there is none at the first link.)
Presumably the rumored Flickr purchase will fit in here as well.
Google search cheat sheet. Nice. I didn't know about 'date:'. That's something I have really been wanting.
Jon Udell has been making posts in a new style he is calling a screencast. He does it with flash, which I like to bash, but this is a very nice use of the technology. Basically he just talks about something web related and you hear his voice while watching a flash movie of his screen. Here is his most recent screencast which he describes as "a whirlwind tour of del.icio.us from my own perspective as a power user."
Check it out. Screencasts are a great way to explain web related technology, and del.icio.us is an important addition to the blog world that deserves a wider understanding.
Comvu has a Windows Mobile solution for streaming video from your (Windows Mobile) video phone. Here's a slightly more technical page.
I wonder if Quicktime broadcaster will ever run on a phone? Apple seems dangerously shut out of the cellular game. Maybe something like a mobile iSight plus Quicktime broadcaster plus wifi could work, but that would be an extremely niche product compared to a cellphone.
I think streaming video from your phone will be a more compelling app than watching some prepackaged video content on your phone. But we need one of the cellular companies to knock the walls around their garden down a bit. I want to stream to *my* server.
Mr. Technorati, Dave Sifry, has posted a new State of the Blogosphere report compiled from their huge mine of blog data:
Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That's just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times.Lots more interesting numbers and graphs at the link above.
Things don't appear to be letting up either....