Category: the value of X

is that there are so many to choose from.

I just found out that 802.11a — what was the weaker precursor of 802.11b, the WiFi standard — is now bigger and stronger at 56 Mbits/second just like 802.11g.

What does this mean? All I’ve been able to determine is that 802.11a is better in a lot of ways, most notably that it operates in the 5 GHz spectrum rather than the increasingly crowded 2.4 GHz 802.11b, BlueTooth, and wireless phones operate.

And to add to my confusion, mixed-mode a/b equipment has been out for a year, well ahead of 802.11g. So why has Apple embraced the g standard? I can only assume that it’s interoperability with the 802.11b hardware they already support was a strong selling point.

For the life of me, I can’t see a whole lot of use for 56 Mbit anyway. It’s not 100 MBit so it’s not the next logical step up from 10. I’d like to dig up the article with Bill Joy talking abou the wireless stuff they (Sun) setup in Aspen and his determination that 1 MBit was about all anyone used: more than that made no difference. That may not be true in the these rich media days, but is 10 Mbits/second enough?

I can save $200 on the new ‘Books

12.1″ TFT Display (1024 x 768), 1.2″ thick, 4.6 pounds, 5 hour battery life PB G4/867 MHz – 256MB RAM / 40GB Hard Drive / Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) GeForce4 420 Go with 32MB / Airport Extreme Ready (Card Required) [CPU491] ……………………………. 1699.00*
Includes: Battery, AC Adapter, Two USB ports, One FireWire port, VGA output, S-video, 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet, 56k Modem, Airport Extreme card slot, Built-in BlueTooth module. Bundled Software: Mac OS X, Quicktime, iLife, Quickbooks.

So we have these snappy new PowerBooks, new apps (a browser, the iLife package, and they’re pushing X11 more prominently), but what catches my eye is the new Airport Extreme. 5 times the throughput at half the price. Not that I need more than 10 Mbits/second at home, but I could see the possibilities elsewhere.

And there’s still 3 more days of MacWorld Expo . . . .

I noticed that the virus definitions were stale on the iMac so I went to get the latest DAT file. Think anyone at Network Associates is aware that virex.com is a porn site? Yikes.

I did eventually locate the file, but only through Google: that struck me as strange. It seems like an obvious use for Software Update. If you’re a .Mac member, you get Virex as part of your party bag, so why not enable updates of the DAT files as part of the package?

Safari

Safari offers you a superior Web experience with outstanding performance. Even the most complex of pages load at breakneck speed. In fact, Safari loads pages more quickly than any other Mac Web browser. But that?s not all. Safari uses the advanced interface technologies underlying Mac OS X to offer you an all-new view of the Web, one that?s much easier to use.

why is this based on Konqueror, rather than Gecko?

And without tabbed browsing, it’s a non-starter.
Continue reading “iBrowser”

Apple – PowerBook G4 12″

Presenting the new 12-inch PowerBook G4, featuring a brilliant 12-inch active-matrix display housed in a durable aluminum alloy enclosure weighing just 4.6 pounds. The most compact full-featured notebook in the world starts at just $1799.

802.11g (54 MBits). BlueTooth. FireWire 800 with ports — one for 400 Mbit and one for 800 Mbit.

Apple May Plan Computer Chameleon to Reflect Owners’ Whims

The company’s United States patent application, No. 20030002246, entitled “active enclosure for a computing device,” describes a machine that contains an array of rainbow-hued light-emitting diodes. It seems that the quirky computer maker is considering the manufacture of a machine that acts something like a mood ring a computer whose shells change colors at the owner’s whim.

Interview | Jordan Hubbard Answers Your Questions

If anything has been a surprise to me, it’s been the degree to which people outside of Apple seem to care so intensely about what we’re up to and where we’re going.

Everyone wants to know what the leader is thinking.

Note from Robb

Spring’s a harbinger of a trend toward concept-centric computing where the concepts—people, places, products, etc—that define your life become the center of your computing experience with traditional applications and documents playing a much less important role than before.

That’s what this book was all about. But instead of an application, Donald Norman envisions activity-specific devices: a checkbook computer and printer, a grocery list organizer/computer/printer, instead of the horribly complicated “jack of all tasks” machines we’ve all been told we need.

I doubt that fragmentation would be useful, but I do like what I am reading about Spring and how it reminds me of my first encounter with the old Mac interface. I’ll have to try this thing out. <sigh> where’s that iBook when I need it?

Spotted here

Mac OS X: iCalendar Files on Mac OS X

iCalendar Files on Mac OS X
Apple’s new calendar application, iCal, is available for Mac OS 10.2. iCal makes it easy to publish and share your calendar data online, either through .Mac or third-party services. Perhaps of more interest to developers, iCal stores its data in the standard iCalendar (.ics) file format, which is used by other calendar programs, like Mozilla Calendar. This means you can take advantage of existing libraries to develop your own applications for sharing and publishing iCal files.

In this article, I’ll go over some options for publishing your iCal data through outside services. I’ll then show you how you can start working with code that will let you display your calendars on your own OS X server. I’ll start with the basics of the iCalendar file format, introduce you to some ways of dealing with iCal files in Perl and PHP, and finally demonstrate a PHP-based WML calendar viewer for cellular phones and other mobile devices.

And I just got a new phone last week. Can’t see paying for web-based services right now, but this article looks like a good primer on taking iCal/ics files to HTML and WML formats.

Kudos to Wade for this one.