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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

Thursday, August 07, 2003

Fans vs. Galactica
In a recent article, the never-as-cool-as-it-was-perceived magazine takes a look at the upcoming Galactica TV mini-series and the problems fans have with some of the changes. But who cares? In October, we'll have the complete original series and feature film on DVD. Sounds good to me.

[ Posted at 5:11 PM | Permalink ]

Wednesday, August 06, 2003

Mozilla Calendar goes solo
Mostafa Hosseini, the new maintainer for Mozilla Calendar, recently announced the availability of the first beta of the standalone version of the product, predictably named Sunbird. The initial build, sadly, is Linux-only. However, Windows Firebird 0.6.1 users can download a new Calendar build that works with that product.

[ Posted at 8:01 PM | Permalink ]

More Battlestar Galactica 2003!
Thanks Grant! There's a nice site up for the upcoming Battlestar Galactica 2003 mini-series, with some shots of ships and crew. Good stuff.

[ Posted at 2:21 PM | Permalink ]

Tuesday, August 05, 2003

Intel exec speaks out on Jobs, Apple
Intel has been curiously silent during the entire controversy surrounding Apple's inflated claims for the G5. Until now. In an interview with Edmonton Journal, Intel senior VP and chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger answered a few questions about Steve Jobs, Apple, and the G5. His comments were dead-on. "In Apple's 3% of the market share, people say they can't innovate when they (Apple) control the hardware or the software. In our horizontal market anybody at any layer can largely and independently perform independent innovation. Now when you add up those two models, at the end of the day, the horizontal one wins most of the time and that's what we've committed ourselves and our industry to ... I think Steve Jobs has made the wrong CPU choice for 20 years, he just added a few more years to the life of his bad decisions. Steve's not an illogical guy, he's passionate and opinionated about the directions he wants is a poor path for the company as well as a poor path for the users ... Our chips would help Apple could find ways to open up more applications for themselves, a broader set of products, we have Centrino mobile products that are stunningly good. I don't think it's a good decision for Apple or for their customers, but they've done a good job of turning the company back around at the same time so you can't discount all the things that they're doing and all the decisions they've made." The interview is largely non-Apple related and worth reading. His comments about the future of notebooks is particularly interesting, for example: "I have this vision of the 111A laptop - one pound, one inch, one day and "always" connected anywhere, running for 12 hours on batteries...but that is three or four years away."

[ Posted at 6:35 PM | Permalink ]

Yes, Virginia, Dave Winer is still a jackass
Someone could make a career out of lambasting Dave Winer, but before we thank him for making it so damned easy, let's consider his latest melodrama. The persnickity King of Blogging (tm) picked up a useful little technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which seeks to create a standard for posting content online; it was originally invented at Netscape, and how Winer got control of it is unclear. The wider problem is, RSS isn't perfect, and with a bunch of companies like Google, the W3C, IBM and other seeking to standardize and improve it, Winer turned on the brakes, refusing to allow any changes to the RSS core. Winer, as I've often said, is a jackass. But what's interesting this time is that people are finally admitting they're sick of the little troll, and they want him to quick the baloney and stop harassing people. Winer, predictably isn't amused, like any little kid used to getting his way. "Why has my personality become the issue? They're using that to try to get me to shut up," Winer said in an interview. "I think most people don't have a difficult time working with me. It's unfair. It's untrue. ... You can't create things with flames--you can only tear things down with flames. If they want to create things, they can't do it with the dislike of one person." Ah, but Dave. You can create things with flames. Swords, for example. Things made of metal. Things that can be used to smite the ugliest wart on the Internet and make him ... just ... go ... away. Wouldn't that be sweet?

[ Posted at 8:49 AM | Permalink ]

Consumer electronics beating office PCs
According to a New York Times report, consumer electronics companies that produce consumer-oriented audio-video products are outdoing their rivals in the PC industry that focus on business computing. This makes the strategy of companies like Dell, Gateway, and Apple all the more understandable, as they put less emphasis on the PC on more on the total digital experience. But if this is true, doesn't it make Apple's "digital hub" strategy as unsuccessful as its Switch campaign? After all, the company lost market share over the past two years.

[ Posted at 8:37 AM | Permalink ]

Monday, August 04, 2003

Yikes. Novell buys Ximian
Novell, Inc., today announced it has acquired privately held Ximian of Boston, Mass. And, in related news: Keep waiting.

[ Posted at 11:26 AM | Permalink ]

Sunday, August 03, 2003

Everything I own is obsolete
With technology, we're pretty used to things becoming obsolete quickly. My Palm Tungsten T was upgrade to the T2 just weeks after I bought it. Heck, the iMac I bought this spring was obsolete about three months before I got it. But my chair? How could they? According to this article (subscription required), Herman Miller is set to replace my beloved Aeron chair with ... with ... the Mirra? Ouch.

[ Posted at 8:43 PM | Permalink ]

VAIO developers' stories
The makers of the Sony VAIO RZ, W, Z1 and XBRIGHT screen discuss their designs in a set of pages Apple could be jealous of.

[ Posted at 3:23 PM | Permalink ]

Men Without Hats on Mac OS X and more
In an interview with AppleLinks (a lame Apple newbie site), Men Without Hats' Stefan Doroschuk explains that he only installed OS X because he needed it for a digital camera. And that's all he uses it for. "[Mac OS X] has a loud and ugly interface with all of those huge icons at the bottom, and if I have a non-X program (98% of my stuff), it opens in classic mode anyways, which is absurd, so I use up a lot more memory having the two OSs open, which is bullshit," he says. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it, but now it's broke for sure and needs to be fixed. Oh yeah, and I can't surf the internet with X because it was too stupid to find all of the prefs that were used by OS 9, and I can't figure out how to get it to work (and I'm no computer dummy!). So if Apple can't make X easier/better/nicer than 9, why bother? I don't know why they even felt like they had to change everything. 9 looked fine, worked fine and nobody was even asking them to change anything. X is a complete disaster, 0 out of 10." Doroschuk also has some very interesting things to say about the history of music singles and how much they made off "The Safety Dance." Fascinating stuff.

[ Posted at 10:24 AM | Permalink ]

iTunes sales tank
I'm not sure why this is surprising, as there is such a small market of people that can even access the service, but music sales at Apple's iTunes Music Store are falling fast. When the service debuted on April 28, iTunes was loggin sales of 200,000 per day. By May 5, sales had topped 1,000,000, dropping the average per day to 140,000 songs. By mid-May, this figure had fallen to 125,000. By June 1, it was less than 100,000 per day. Sensing a trend? Wait, it gets worse. By June 23, Apple had sold 5 million songs, so the average daily sales had fallen to 89,000. On July 22, the total sales hit hit 6.5 million, droping the average to just 52,000 sales per day. That means Apple is selling far fewer than that per day right now, dropping the service perilously close to statistical irrelevency. Anyone want to take bets on when Buymusic.com surpasses iTunes' sales? I'm guessing it happens before Apple releases the Windows version of iTunes.

[ Posted at 9:58 AM | Permalink ]

Another feature Apple's stealing from Windows
Someone should compile a list of the features Apple is stealing from Windows, as Apple fans seem to take a misdirected delight in every OS X feature they mistakenly believe Apple invented first. There are plenty of these in OS X now, and the next version--code-named Jaguar--really raises the "not invented here" ratio dramatically. Here's one I hadn't heard about until recently: Panther will include built-in compression capabilities, which raises two issues in my mind. First, Microsoft did this first in Windows 98 SE, with Compressed Folders (it actually debuted a year earlier for Windows 98 customers that bought Plus! for Windows 98). Second, Apple is killing yet another successful third party product, StuffIt, in its ever-decreasing market, which is not a wise idea. What, you want more? I got more. One of the coolest third party utilities I ever bought for OS X was an applet called LiteSwitch X that makes task switching in OS X more like than in Windows, with a screen-centered display of the currently running applications which pops-up when you use ALT+TAB (Apple + TAB). I paid about $20-30 for this utility, as I recall. Well, fear not, Windows-style application switching will be in Panther. One more Windows feature, one less third party application.

[ Posted at 9:51 AM | Permalink ]