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About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Coming soon: Everything Must Go

The next edition of "Everything Must Go" will be appearing here soon. --Paul

Friday, August 02, 2002

StarOffice for OS X clarification
Looks like StarOffice isn't coming to Mac OS X. What is coming, however is OpenOffice.org 1.0, which is Good Enough.

[ Posted at 1:53 PM | Permalink ]

New Linux beta
Mandrake 9.0 (Beta 2) was updated this week. These betas are coming so fast now that I might just wait for the final releases. In testing Mandrake 9.0 Beta 1, I've found the same old set of issues, such as useles, non-working hardware detection (a USB mouse and a very common wireless networking card, for example). When are they going to get Linux working on the desktop?

[ Posted at 1:52 PM | Permalink ]

Thursday, August 01, 2002

Bad user interface or RTFM?
OK, so I've had this Volkswagen New Beetle for almost exactly two years now and it came with a factory installed six-disc CD changer in the trunk. I've always thought the thing was a little flaky: You'd change the discs around, close the trunk, hop in the car, fire up the stereo, and then at least 50 percent of the time the stereo display would read CHECK MAGAZIN, which I always understood meant that there was a problem of some sort. So for two years, every time I'd see this message, I'd hop back out of the car, open the trunk, eject the CD magazine, and fiddle around with the discs a bit. Nonsensical, yes, but it eventually worked every time. Yesterday, I bought a bunch of CDs at Best Buy and I figured I'd listen to one on the way home from the store, so I popped it in the changer and, sure enough, was greeted with a CHECK MAGAZIN message when I turned on the stereo. This time, I left the car running and the stereo on, got out, opened the trunk and... walla... the music started playing. And then I had the epiphany. CHECK MAGAZIN wasn't an instruction for me to check the CD magazine. It was simply an alert that the stereo knew that the CDs had changed, and it was checking the magazine to see which slots were filled. Duh. So ... is this really bad design? Or am I just an idiot? I think there are compelling cases to be made for both possibilities.

[ Posted at 12:35 AM | Permalink ]

Wednesday, July 31, 2002

I've been saying this for years...
For Linux or Mac OS X to truly succeed, let alone supplant Windows, they must offer a better customer solution than Windows and not simply ape the Windows GUI as they do now. So many people act like Mac OS X, especially, is revolutionary when, in fact, it does nothing more than put a (debatably) pretty face on the same tired desktop metaphor we've had for decades. This article by Thomas Krul expands on this simple concept, but then I've been arguing this for years. Interestingly, the only company outdoing the Windows GUI is Microsoft: Windows XP's task-based interface is lightyears ahead of OS X, KDE, and GNOME. Deal with it.

[ Posted at 12:55 AM | Permalink ]

Monday, July 29, 2002

The Robert Ludlum Title Generator
This is classic. The Apocolypse Watch. The Aquitaine Progression. The Chancellor Manuscript. The Holcroft Covenant. The Hades Factor. The Cassandra Compact. The Paris Option. The Prometheus Deception. The Sigma Protocol. LOL.

[ Posted at 9:51 PM | Permalink ]

Reality distortion field
I'm still reeling from my long Apple meeting last week, so as I often do after falling under the spell of Steve Jobs and company, I decided to reaquaint myself with Jobs' history so I could get better footing. I started with re-reading Alan Deutschman's Second Coming of Steve Jobs, which is good though it focuses more on personal matters than on the corporate and computer stuff, which I crave. Anyway, a passage about NeXT's then-new office space gave me a chilling deja vu. Deutschman writes, "[Jobs] hired I. M. Pei's architectural firm to build a dramatic freestanding staircase off the lobby. 'Steve wanted the company to feel larger than life, and sure enough it did,' recalls David Wertheimer, who was a Next executive at the time. 'It felt like, here's a company that's really making it, when in reality it wasn't selling a single computer."

Flash forward a decade and the Jobs-led Apple is getting similar press and market attention compared to NeXT back then, and yet Apple's market share has only fallen under Jobs' leadership. But here's the deja vu moment: Two weeks ago at MacWorld New York, Jobs announced the company's "flaship" Apple Store in downtown Manhatten. According to Apple, the store, which was designed by Architect Peter Bohlin of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, features a two-story layout and a massive glass staircase. "The glass staircase that serves as the focal point when you first enter the store is unique, as well," writes Peter Cohen, in a MacCentral article that includes many photos. "It's comprised entirely of glass, apparently the first of its kind in the world, and it reflects the sunlight which pours in from a giant skylight in the roof--an embellishment not originally in the building's design plans, according to Jobs. The combined effect is to welcome users to visit the upstairs part of the store." In fact, everything about the store is designed to give the impressive of, yes, a company that's really making it.

Is Apple really selling a single computer these days?

[ Posted at 1:27 PM | Permalink ]

Douglas Adams predicted "Rendezvous"
This is neat. In a 1989 letter to MacUser Magazine, deceased author Douglas Adams predicted "Rendezvous," the zero-configuration networking technology that Apple touted earlier this month and will ship in Jaguar next month. He wrote, "All I want is to print from my portable. (Poor baby.) That isn't all I want, in fact. I want to be able regularly to transfer my address book and diary stacks backward and forward between my portable and my [other Mac] ... I just want to carry it into the same room. Bang. There it is. It's on the desktop. This is infra-red talk. Or maybe it's microwave talk." And that, of course, is exactly the kind of functionality that Rendezvous provides. Nice job, Douglas.

[ Posted at 1:14 PM | Permalink ]

Jackass
Perennial jackass award winner Stephen Manes writes that PC users sick of the Blue Screen of Death should just buy a Mac. Only someone who doesn't use Mac OS X regularly, as I do and Manes obviously doesn't, would assume that it's more stable than Windows XP. It isn't, and any Mac OS X user accustomed to the "beach ball of death" (where an application just freezes and never comes back) knows exacty what I'm talking about. Manes has made a career out of being controversial, but the truth is that Windows XP is better--for most people--than OS X. It just is, Stevie.

Oh, and BTW: Few people would argue that I don't spend a lot of time with Windows XP. In fact, I've been running it regularly since Beta 2 in February 2001. I have yet to see a single Blue Screen in XP. Not one. Not on several different machines, including numerous laptops. Never. Ever. Am I tempting the fates? Maybe. I don't care. It won't happen. Ever.

[ Posted at 1:08 PM | Permalink ]

Sunday, July 28, 2002

Another switch story
Though this one is less typical than most, and horribly written (everyone thinks they're a writer). The moral? Poor people can't afford Macs.

[ Posted at 11:18 PM | Permalink ]