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New BitTorrent 4.0.1 clinet for Linux, Windows, and Mac. (Well, 4.0.1 is new for Mac I'm not totally sure if it's new for the other platforms.)
FAQ: Forty years of Moore's Law.
Today, on Apple's 29th birthday, the latest developmental build of Mac OS X 10.4 - aka Tiger - was declared gold master. That means all development is done and it now goes to the factory to get pressed for distribution. This process usually takes a few weeks, so the April 15th rumors look to be right.
Here's a list of email to SMS gateways that I will probably need some day:
AT&T:Stolen wholesale from the wireless weblog.
AreaCode+Mobile@mobile.att.net
Verizon:
AreaCode+Mobile@vtext.com
Nextel:
AreaCode+Mobile@page.nextel.com
T-Mobile:
AreaCode+Mobile@tmomail.com
Sprint:
AreaCode+Mobile@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Cingular:
1+AreaCode+Mobile@mobile.mycingular.com
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.