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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

Friday, July 18, 2003

John Caramack on DOOM 3 minimum requirements
The master has spoken. 1GHz CPU. 256MB RAM, GF1 or Radeon 7xxx series card. Don't expect to run it fabulous with that system setup , but everything will be playable at least.

[ Posted at 11:51 AM | Permalink ]

Science fun: Same sun. Different views
Nice article from CSM about the sun, which includes a shot about how the star appears from different wavelength in the extreme ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

[ Posted at 11:48 AM | Permalink ]

Apple execs confronted with a lie
This is too funny. As many of you know, Apple has made various bold (and untrue) claims about its upcoming PowerMac G5 systems, one of which is that it is "the world's first 64-bit personal computer." In this interesting Digital Video Editing interview, however, Apple executives are confronted with the fact that the company was not, in fact, the first to ship a 64-bit desktop. Let the hilarity begin...

DMN: Now, you're saying it's the first 64-bit desktop machine. But isn't there an Opteron dual-processor machine? It shipped on June 4th. BOXX Technologies shipped it. It has an Opteron 244 in it.

[Apple senior VP Jon] Rubinstein: Uh...

[IBM VP Jon] Akrout: It's not a desktop.

DMN: That's a desktop unit.

Akrout: It depends on what you call a desktop, now. These… From a full desktop per se, this is the first one. I don't know how you really distinguish the other one as a desktop.

DMN: Well, it's a dual processor desktop machine, just like that one.

Akrout: It's not 64, then.

DMN: Yes, it's a 64-bit machine with two Opteron chips in it. It started shipping June 4th.

Akrout: That we'll double check, but in my mind, it wasn't.

Behind the humorous bits, the interview is excellent, with lots of good information. For example, there are absolutely NO plans for G5-based notebooks. Yuck.

[ Posted at 11:24 AM | Permalink ]

Great interview
Web designer Jeffrey Zeldman discusses Apple, Web standards, and Mac OS X in this great interview (on a total newbie Mac site, which is bizarre); it's great because of what Jeffrey says, not because of the questions, which are often inane (and in some cases, just wrong: The Mac's market share is 2 percent, for example, not 5 percent). Still, his comments about developing to open standards is well-put. "It takes the same amount of time and money to design with standards as it does to design for IE/Win only," he says. "If you design with standards, your site will work in Windows, Mac OS, and Linux/Unix. It will work in IE, IE/Mac (which is a different beast), Safari, Mozilla, Opera, Omniweb and Konqueror. It will likely work in Palm Pilots, in text browsers, in web-enabled cell phones, and in screen readers used by people used by people with disabilities. If you spend the same amount of time and money designing for IE/Win only, your site will only work in IE/Win." Bravo.

[ Posted at 11:19 AM | Permalink ]

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Switch campaign a failure
As I've been saying all along, no one is switching to the Mac. In fact, Dell is gaining market share at a rate year-over-year that's as large as Apple's total market share, so we might humorously argue that the only switchers out there are, in fact, switching to Dell. So how does Apple reverse this trend and actually make up some of the ground its lost to Windows? Well, it can start by telling the truth about its products and marketing them as elegant, well-made alternatives to the status quo. Of course, that would take a little humility, starting with the company's top executives.

[ Posted at 9:49 PM | Permalink ]

Thunderbird improves
The latest nightly builds of Mozilla Thunderbird feature a new three-pane design that's eerily similar to that of Microsoft Outlook 2003. Sadly, Thunderbird still lacks the "grouping" feature that makes this design actually work, but I think we can presume they're heading in that direction. Cool.

[ Posted at 1:03 PM | Permalink ]

Mac usage nosedives in critical markets
According to a survey by TrendWatch Graphic Arts, Mac usage at Internet design and development firms is lower than ever, with only 22 percent of respondents citing any version of the Mac OS as their primary platform. And though the Mac appears to dominate at design and production firms, with 82 percent of all respondents naming the Mac as their primary OS, only a sobering 17 percent of those users are using Mac OS X. In other words, the most important Mac market isn't upgrading to the new OS and the second most important market is looking elsewhere as well. Mac fanatics will try and see the good news in this, but to me, there's an obvious problem here.

[ Posted at 12:11 PM | Permalink ]

Science fun: The ten brightest stars
Like many people, I'm sure, I'm confused that Celine Dion isn't one of them.

[ Posted at 10:42 AM | Permalink ]

New TweakUI for Windows XP and 2003
This week, Microsoft released an awesome new version of its TweakUI tool that supports Windows XP SP1 and Windows Server 2003. Grab it now, highly recommended.

[ Posted at 10:29 AM | Permalink ]

Tuesday, July 15, 2003

Mozilla Foundation announced
Good news today: Mozilla.org announced the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, which will "continue to promote the development, distribution and adoption of the award-winning Mozilla standards-based web applications and core technologies, including the Gecko browser layout engine. The Mozilla Foundation will continue and expand on the efforts of mozilla.org, the group managing the daily operations of the Mozilla project since its inception." Mitch Kapor will chair the foundation. Nice! Also, and not coincidentally, the Mozilla.org Web site has been significantly updated.

[ Posted at 6:18 PM | Permalink ]

OpenOffice.org 1.1 release candidate out
The release candidate 1 (RC1) build of OpenOffice.org 1.1 is now available for free download. There are an amazing number of updates in this release, including PDF export, support for mailing a document as PDF, support for mobile device formats like AportisDoc (Palm), Pocket Word and Pocket Excel, enhanced footnote support in Writer, autodetection of newly installed languages for spellchecker, thesaurus and hyphenator, Macro Recorder, crash reporter for collecting crash dump and error information, an OpenOffice.org ActiveX Control (Windows only), additional property pages for OpenOffice.org file types in Windows Explorer, a progress bar on the splash screen, improved online help content, a new FTP file access component, basic document recovery features, and much, much more.

[ Posted at 12:36 PM | Permalink ]

Monday, July 14, 2003

Commodore makes a comeback. Kind of
This article notes that the Commodore brand is returning to the PC industry to support the interest in classic computing. Tulip Computer, which owns the Commodore name, estimates that there are still 6 million people using Commodore computers today. In other words, the Commodore 64 today is just as popular as Mac OS X. LOL. Not as funny, however, is the rational behind the move: Tulip is basically enforcing its trademark and seeking licensing fees from anyone using the name Commodore. In other words, this move will hurt the Commodore community more than help it.

[ Posted at 11:20 AM | Permalink ]

Best 404 ever?
I laughed, I cried, I laughed some more. OK, it's offensive, but this just might be the funniest 404 page I've ever seen.

[ Posted at 10:55 AM | Permalink ]

Battlestar Galactica returns
Like most people who grew up in the shadow of Star Wars, I immediately fell in love with the expensive TV sci-fi hit "Battlestar Galactica," which, in a bizarre move, self-imploded in its second season by bringing the crew of the ship to earth in order to save money. Then it went away. Lately, there's been a lot of talk about a remake, and yes, it's happening. But sadly, the new version--a four hour mini-series that will debut in December--will not be a faithful re-creation of the original. Argh. In the new version, the humans are from earth, and not searching for earth, removing the core philosophical and quasi-religious backdrop of the original story. Starbuck is now a woman (!), which sounds ludicrious. But I will give them credit for supposedly making the show "darker, sexier and a lot less escapist than the original." Then again, that's what they said Deep Space Nine would be too, and that got off to a less-than-exciting start.

[ Posted at 10:24 AM | Permalink ]

Like the rest of the planet, I'm skipping MacWorld NY
Remember when this show mattered? Now remember when Apple killed it. Unlike the bizarre InfoWorld story I mention below, Wired's take on the (last) MacWorld NY is dead on. "The lineup of promised new product announcements doesn't provoke chills of anticipation," the article reads. But the best part of this article is a wonderful description of what it's like to attend a Jobs keynote address (Jobs won't be in NY): "I'm going to miss getting morphed into the Jobs alternate time-space continuum," mourned Vince Tuchelle, an independent Apple support technician. "Jobs' keynote gave me a yearly taste of what it would be like to be a cult member. It was like safe lunacy -- you could get all worked up into a frothing lather over the leader's speech, then go right back to your normal life." Of course, for many OS X users, "normal" is the the life where you supposedly run the best OS on the planet on the fastest hardware on the planet and feel the need to denigrate Windows users.

[ Posted at 10:16 AM | Permalink ]

Goof Jobs interview gets it right
Thanks Greg. Imagine if Apple CEO Steve Jobs actually touted what Apple was doing, rather than make bogus proclamations about its Macs. Well, imagine no more. For the uninitiated, BBSpot is basically The Onion for techies, and it's good stuff. Recent select headlines from the site include "Apple Unveils World's Fastest Music Player," "Jakob Nielsen Declares the Letter "C" Unusable," and the classic "Rumsfeld Accuses Saddam of Camping" (Quake fans are rolling in the aisles).

[ Posted at 10:06 AM | Permalink ]