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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 25, 2003

Microsoft babbling on Linux
The unedited Bill Gates can be unintentionally humorous, but his comments about Linux at yesterday's Financial Analysts Meeting are interesting, as he compares what Microsoft is doing in Longhorn to the ways in which Linux is improving. It's rambling, but he makes some good points. "I think that, you know, Linux IS UNIX. It's a form of UNIX. It's not like anyone invented a new way of doing an operating system. It's like FreeBSD was; that existed even ten years ago. The open source approach is valuable for certain types of development. We've always seen software coming out of universities the prototyped various things and was part of the ecosystem of our industry. ... There was a kind of equilibrium between that and the software that was done on a commercial basis. I don't think that's going away. There is a class of innovation that has to do with management, security, natural user interfaces that goes beyond what UNIX has delivered that we are driving forward. It's like designing a 747 or a moon shot where there's a lot of integrated activity: the design, the activity, the pieces that come together, getting a version of Office that fully exploits those things. And our innovation needs to remind people that what they expect out of an operating system isn't standing still. And so there's an onus on us that if it's still 1972, then UNIX is all people expect, then we'll share more space with that kind of approach then if we're revolutionizing and getting a whole new level of expectation. We were able to do that in things like word processing and spreadsheets. We're in the process of doing it in categories like databases and collaboration. Over the next four or five years, that's why we've taken the road of pouring on the R&D, taking advantage of the hiring environment we've got today, and driving things upwards. In the next four or five years, people will understand some of the IP questions that were raised about those systems, and is there some sort of patent pool that people are paying royalties into? How that all plays out so that customers don't feel like they have this open-ended liability for something that comes without that indemnification. I don't have an exact prediction for that, but that's certainly going to put some notion of rights and friction into that side of the system."

[ Posted at 1:24 PM | Permalink ]

Thursday, July 24, 2003

Science fun: Where that lobster came from
We have lobster pretty regularly here in New England, but I know from living in Phoenix for several years that that's not always the case, depending on where you are. This cool article from the New York Times examines an effort to find out where all those lobsters caught in Maine actually end up. Nice!

[ Posted at 10:45 AM | Permalink ]

So why the hubbub about portable audio players?
I have a 5 GB iPod, which was the first model Apple offered. Indeed, Apple gave me the device in November 2001, so I've never actually paid for a portable audio player. Now, however, I'm in the market for a new one, as 5 GB doesn't even come close to handling the amount of digital audio I own. Naturally, given my good luck with the iPod, I've looked at the new iPod. However, you may be surprised to hear that they stink, and it has nothing to do with battery life. No, the new iPods are lousy because they're designed poorly and each of the models is of varying thicknesses, requiring different bases. That's weird, but the new "no moving parts" scroll wheel is the worst. Because it's touch-sensitive, I often inadvertantly clicked the middle button while scrolling, causing it to select whatever happened to be highlighted as I moved down a list of music. That would drive me insane. And the new row of control buttons is one half dozen/six to me: I think the old scheme worked just fine, thank you very much. So what are the options? I could try to find a previous generation model, which topped out at 20 GB. But then I'd be left out of the market for new add-ons, necessitated because Apple changed the ports and layout of the device when it went to the new generation (nothing like making something obsolete 18 months after it was released). Or I could look at the competition. Not coincidentally, I was just looking at the Creative Zen, which is mentioned in the post below. Problems? Sure. It doesn't work with iTunes, which I prefer for managing music. I could get around that easily, however, because all of my music is on Windows too, of course. But it's not an obvious choice. I will say this: Apple needs to wake up to the pricing problem quick, or it can kiss its last popular niche market goodbye. And I might be leaving with it.

[ Posted at 10:38 AM | Permalink ]

Dispelling iPod myths
He didn't mean to do it, but Merc columnist Mike Langberg nicely dispenses with a slew of iPod myths in a story about hard drive-based portable audio players. First, the iPod does not have 50 percent of the portable audio market, as so many people now tell me when they complain about Buymusic.com, which doesn't support the iPod (in other words, "If it's so pervasive, why doesn't it support 50 percent of the portable audio market??" I've been asked). Well. As Langberg points out, hard drive-based portable audio players are a "niche product today." Indeed, the last statistic I saw was that they represented 12 percent of the total market, so if Apple owns 50 percent of that (and sure, why not?), it owns just 6 percent of the total market for portable audio devices. But even that isn't the reason Buymusic.com doesn't support the iPod; the reason is that Apple refuses to add (the free) support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) 9 format, probably because it's afraid users would notice the quality difference if they had AAC, MP3, and WMA all running on the same player. Second, Apple didn't invent, innovate, or otherwise create the hard drive-based portable audio player either. Indeed, they were quite late to the game: "Creative saw the opportunity first," he writes, "introducing the original Nomad Jukebox with a 6 GB hard drive at $499 in September 2000. Apple followed with the first iPod in November 2001." Finally, the iPod is not a tremendous bargain at all. Despite the fact that the iPod is, in most ways, nicer than any of the comepition, consider these prices and tell me which product is the shoe-in. "Creative is already out front of Apple in capacity; the new Nomad Jukebox Zen at $399 offers an awesome 60 GB of storage," Langberg explains. "Apple's iPod at the same price offers only 15 GB, with a $499 model at 30 GB." Best of all, "Creative broke through the $200 price point with its 10 GB Nomad Jukebox 2 at $199." Apple has no such product; it's cheapest iPod is $100 more, at $299, for the same capacity. But wait, there's more: The 60 GB Zen gets 14 real hours of battery life; Apple advertises 8 hours for the iPod, but it's more like 6 hours in real life. In other words, it's a no-brainer. And no, the iPod does not come out ahead.

[ Posted at 10:32 AM | Permalink ]

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Apple discusses benchmarking claims
Apple's Tom Boger, the product manager for the Power Mac range, was recently interviewed on IT Enquirer (no, I've never heard of them either) and had a few interesting things to say about the G5 benchmarking claims and other related topics. First, he said the 64-bitness of the G5 offered no huge advantages because they've been able to increase the memory address space of the 32-bit OS. "The floating point unit is more important to us than the applications running 64-bit," he said. But Boger admits that comparisons between the performance of the G5 and a Pentium machine are not entirely honest. The dual-processor G5 should be compared to a dual-Xeon workstation, according to Boger. "Those are workstations used for CAD/CAM most of the time. We ran benchmarks against these machines, and the G5 is faster," he said. But perhaps Apple-afficionados should stop making comparisons with any Intel-based PC, the interview reads: Pentiums are used for office applications mainly. The dual-Xeon is used for CAD/CAM. But the G5--as most Power Macs--will mainly be used by creative professionals. It is hard if not impossible to compare CAD/CAM to office applications, to graphics and 3D design.

[ Posted at 12:34 PM | Permalink ]

Mozilla 1.5 alpha available
The new version features big improvements to Composer (yawn), logging in Chatzilla, a quicksearch filter has been implemented for about:config (finally), various improvements to tabbed browsing, and other small improvements. Get it now if you like to live on the edge. However, Mozillazine.org notes that "mozilla.org hopes to release a Firebird 0.6.1 in the coming week to pick up some of the latest changes, including some crashes that were present in the 0.6 release. Following that, the current plan is to release a Thunderbird 0.1 prior to 1.5b, and a Firebird 0.7 alongside Mozilla 1.5 final, and continue to move towards replacing the trunk with the new standalone applications." So I'd just wait for the next Firebird and Thunderbird milestones, personally.

[ Posted at 12:22 PM | Permalink ]

DOOM 3 delayed until 2004
I think I speak for most gamers when I react to the following news with a combination of silent shock and anger. Id software's long-awaited DOOM 3 will not ship in time for Christmas 2003 as promised but will instead be delayed until January-March 2004. This totally blows, and the glacial development of this title now rivals that of Windows Server 2003.

[ Posted at 12:03 PM | Permalink ]

Serious Sam?
Biding the time between now and the releases of DOOM 3, Half-Life 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004, I've been playing the ultra-cheap ($5 at CompUSA if you can believe that) Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. It's excellent, very much like the orginal DOOM with better graphics and almost painfully relentless. If you're not familiar with Serious Sam (I only briefly played the original and was unimpressed, though I'll revisit it now, of course), it was basically independently created by a small team of Croatian programmers and has developed into a game that, in many ways, rivals the technology and game play of more mainstream efforts like Quake III and Unreal 2. At this price, it's hard to pass by. Just be sure to play at one of the lower skill levels; I've been going through it on one of the middle skill levels and it's just too hard.

[ Posted at 12:01 PM | Permalink ]

Tungsten T|2
As predicted, Palm has made my latest handheld obsolete with the introduction of the Tungsten T|2, which doubles the internal memory to 32MB (from 16 in the T), adds a superior 320 x 320 transflective colour screen, and adds Palm OS 5.2.1. The T|2 also drops the original's dark gray color and adopts a lighter gray. Carried over from the previous version is the 144MHz Ti OMAP 1510 processor and built-in Bluetooth. Basically, there's no reason to upgrade, and the screen on the original T is excellent.

[ Posted at 11:56 AM | Permalink ]

Firebird tip of the day
I hated automatic image resizing in IE and I hate it now in Firebird. But at least IE gives up a UI for turning it off. In Firebird, you can add the following line to prefs.js to turn off this annoyance:
user_pref("browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing", false);

[ Posted at 11:52 AM | Permalink ]

Day two with Buymusic.com, part two
I take it this is bad. "Make sure you mean to buy your music from your primary computer so that it contains your primary license," the Buymusic.com help page reads. "The licenses are non-transferable. " So. What if I sell my PC? Does that mean I can't play my purchased music on the new PC? I think it does mean that. And if it does mean that, this service has a huge and potentially catastrophic problem that is going to bite customers right in the ass.

[ Posted at 10:28 AM | Permalink ]

Day two with Buymusic.com
As the Buymusic.com saga hits day two, a few chinks appear in the armor of the Windows team. First, one of the best features of iTunes (and I've now downloaded 157 songs from the service) is that Apple lets you copy songs to up to three Macs (though the process is not automated or easy); the best part is you can assign and de-assign machines to the three-machine list, which is handy if you sell or upgrade systems. On Windows, using Buymusic.com, we have nothing like that. In fact, all of the songs I've donwloaded, and most of the songs I've seen on the site, only let you use them on a single PC. So when you copy music to a second PC (like a laptop), you're out of luck and it will not play. There is no great way to get around this, beyond burning the songs to CD and copying them over that way, and while the results so far are satisfactory, it's not elegant. But the big problem is that Buymusic.com offers no (obvious at least) way to change your license. And that's a problem: I change my main PC at least once a year, and that means my purchased songs (about a dozen so far) will be useless once I switch machines. I suspect that they have a way around this, or will, but so far I haven't seen anything about this problem on the site. I'll keep looking and maybe send in a query...

[ Posted at 10:21 AM | Permalink ]

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

BuyMusic.com kicks iTunes Music Store butt, takes names
So BuyMusic.com is live. Like the excellent iTunes Music Store, it offers digital singles and album for download. The layout of the site is, perhaps, overly similar to iTunes. The similarities end there. BMC offers more songs (300K vs. 200K), better sound (WMA 9 vs. AAC), better prices (singles start at 79 cents vs. 99 cents), much better PC compatibility (it reaches the 97 percent of the world using Windows, not the ~1 percent using OS X), and better device compatibility (slew of devices vs. just a few on iTMS). The much ballyhooed problem with BMC--various DRM-related "limitations"--are not a problem: Most songs have unlimited sharing capabilities, or very reasonable limits (i.e. a limit of 10 CD burns. Oooohhhh.). In other words, iTMS, excellent though it is, is now officially toast. Apple should have supported Windows from Day One. Now, it's too late.

[ Posted at 10:54 AM | Permalink ]