...more recent posts
The wide screen powerbook rumors that I thought had been debunked have surfaced again with some vigor. 15.2 inch screen, capable of 1152x768! That would be very cool. I'm still doubtful, but we'll know a little bit past noon. You can watch Steve crank up the hype machine yourself here.
Macworld San Francisco is tomorrow (well, all this week, but Job's keynote is tomorrow, so that's when the big announcements from Apple will come.) Hopefully debuting will be the powerbook g4 with its often rumored but never seen sleek new ultrathin design. Some people claim the whole machine is the thickness of the bottom half of the present powerbook. Nice. New desktops also, but I'll be highly surprised if they announce anything over 600 mhz (or if they do announce something higher, you won't be able to get one for months.) Small chance that OS X will be officially released, but I think Macworld Tokyo is a better bet (end of February.) Also possible is the long awaited 17 inch flat panel. I'll be watching.
I'm still trying to digest this article which is subtitled "how to make the free distribution of content profitable." I think he may have something here. Sort of radical, and I think the big content publishing industries are going to have to go through with (the failure of) the "trusted client" model first, but Mr. Copley has at least hit upon a scheme that could work. I wasn't sure this much was even possible. Very intriguing.
The Swiss are going to have a national referendum to decide the question of giving animals legal status as "beings" and not "assets." (from kuro5hin)
Macs in space. Using orbiting G4 Cubes to provide low cost wireless internet access anywhere on the globe.
Desktop Websites is the latest catch phrase from the userland camp. He's definitely got something here, but I wonder if it can be bootstrapped into existence. The problem, as usual, has to do with Metcalfe's law which states that "the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users." Or, in other words, it won't be cool until a lot of people are using it, but how do you convince people to invest the time and/or money associated with adopting a new technology before it's cool? As always, we're watching. It's not out of the question that I would move to their platform.
Here are some really good photos of the monolith that "appeared" in Seattle after New Years.
Oh good. I've been looking for a reason to uninstall flash.
From 7CR:
"... I have to give professional spammers a point for creativity with the recent flock of email that says, 'Is this XXXX, if not sorry for the bother.' I can only imagine how many valid email addresses that must have harvested. Still, should I ever meet the purpetrator on the street, I can think of some fine action involving a ball-peen hammer and really bad opinion of direct marketing. It's the cowardice. At least beggars have the courage to look you in the face and ask for money with no suppositions..."I got one of these too. I was going to mention it, as this was probably pretty effective for them. As I've said once before - DO NOT REPLY to any message that you do not want, or that you don't know what it is. Spammers want to get lists of active email addresses to sell to other spammers who want to fill you mailboxes with useless offers for off shore tax havens, and various get rich quick schemes. If you reply to a message like this, then they know your address is good, and YOU WILL BE SOLD and resold untill your mailbox is no good to you anymore (unless you are really lonely, and you'd rather get these spams then nothing, in which case you are in luck...) No one will ever read your message, so all the cursing or pleading or whatever you try to do is all to no avail. Just ignore them, and while they won't go away, they might not bother you as much. And just for the record, although I do hate spammers, and would love to meet one in real life, I'll take them over a total government monitoring program that would be needed to stop them. Stiffer penalties might be a good way to go though. How about $250,000 fines for convicted spammers, and the money goes into funding existing and new MAE nodes (is that what you would call them?)