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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, September 19, 2003

Firebird 0.7 coming soon
djst reports that Mozilla Firebird 0.7 will be out by the end of the month. Hopefully it will fix the bug in the nightly builds where hyperlinks from external apps bring up a dialog box that does nothing; it's geting irritating.

[ Posted at 4:16 PM | Permalink ]

Thursday, September 18, 2003

Internet Nexus now RSS-aware
Thanks to Keith for setting up the Nexus to publish a version of this blog in XML-based RSS. You can use any RSS news feed aggregator, but Keith recommends Newsgator, which integrates nicely into Microsoft Outlook. 9/19 update: Chris McElwee suggests the Bradsoft FeedDemon RSS Reader, a standalone application that doesn't require Outlook. Thanks, Chris!

[ Posted at 11:08 AM | Permalink ]

New iPod arrives
So my refurbished 30 GB iPod arrived this morning (a day late thanks to an under-zealous Fed-Ex driver, ahem). You'd never know it wasn't new. Everything in the box (and the box itself) is, in fact, brand new, still shrinkwrapped. And even the iPod is as-new, also in shrinkwrap. Nice. Anyway, Apple is up to its usual tricks with "designed by Apple in California" notes everywhere (but built by laborers in China, incidentally) and overly-lavish packaging, but the device looks solid. It's kind of astonishing what you get in the box: The iPod itself, a new iPod Dock, a new thinner Firewire cable with the Dock-specific end, a Firewire-to-power plug adapter, a pair of ear-bud headphones (still lousy), a wired remote control (making for a lot of very long wires), a 9 pin-to-6 pin Firewire adapter (for those pesky PC notebooks without powered Firewire ports), two sets of foam ear-bud covers (why one isn't on by default is unknown), a carrying case, and a little carrying bag. Oh, and the unnecessary software and a small manual. I've been uploading my music library for the past hour and it's still got a ways to go (its 24.22 GB on the iMac) so I haven't really tested it yet, and docking it will charge the battery anyway. But compared to my previous iPod, the new version is svelte and cute. So far so good.

[ Posted at 10:58 AM | Permalink ]

More benchmark fun: Low-end Pentium-M PC bests fastest PowerBook G4 on planet
When the PowerBook G4 17-inch first appeared (which is to say about two months after Apple said it would appear), I headed over to the local Apple Store to check out its performance. As with my iMac, I was hugely disappointed: Launching applications like Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, which I have on both the PC and Mac, was painfully slow. This week, Bare Feats compared the very latest PowerBook G4 17-inch--which now runs at 1.33 GHz--with various other PowerBooks and a PC notebook based on the lowly 1.3 GHz Pentium M (the lowest speed supported by the "normal" Pentium M, it also runs at 1.4, 1.5, 1.6. and 1.7 GHz). Guess which machine won all the "pro creative" application benchmarks? Yep, the lowly Pentium M. So much for the megahertz myth: At just 1.3 MHz, the Pentium M has a slightly lower clockspeed than the PowerBook's 1.33 GHz. A comment in the review matches my experiences and thoughts about the PowerBook G4s: "I'm sorry to see Apple tout the PowerBook as a desktop replacement. It might be a replacement for the iMac or single cpu Power Mac for browzing the net and writing memos. But it can't keep up with the "big dogs" for really tough jobs."

[ Posted at 8:54 AM | Permalink ]

Mozilla 1.5 release candidate
The Mozilla Foundation released the first of two release candidate builds of Mozilla 1.5 last night. The new version features many Composer improvements (yawn), Chatzilla logging, tabbed browsing improvements, spellchecking, and many other improvements. Download the Windows version here.

[ Posted at 8:32 AM | Permalink ]

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Worst. Tradeshow. Ever.
Keith has a nice writeup about our experiences at PC Expo, which was easily the worst tradeshow we've ever been to, at least the show floor part of it. The meetings were great--sadly most of them are under NDA for the time being--and of course there was the cab incident and a trip to the top of the Empire State Building. But otherwise, a rather unexciting trip.

[ Posted at 9:35 AM | Permalink ]

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Another subtle Apple lie
And since I never get tired of listing the ways in which Apple has completely lied to its fans about the G5, let's take a look at a particular promise Apple CEO Steve Jobs made about the 3 GHz speeds the chip would soon reach. At the WWDC in early June, Jobs promised the G5 would reach 3 GHz "within a year." Today, at Apple Expo in France, Jobs changed the story to "by the end of the next summer," a.k.a. by the end of September 2004. So what's the difference between May 2004 and September 2004? I guess it depends on what yardstick you use to measure BS.

[ Posted at 10:54 PM | Permalink ]

New Powerbooks: No L3 cache
I'm surprised I noticed this on my own, but sure enough, the three new PowerBook G4 models do not include any L3 cache at all, which is a huge problem for people like me that need to run Virtual PC. What gives?? Otherwise, each of the systems appears to be a decent deal for what you get, and all of them are cheaper and more powerful than the models they replace. Except for that darned, all-important L3 cache. Weird.

[ Posted at 10:43 PM | Permalink ]

Apple finally releases 15" PowerBook
... and it looks great, but where was this puppy 6 months ago when it should have debuted? The new version includes a 1.25GHz PowerPC G4, 512K of L2 cache, AirPort Extreme, a megawide display, Radeon graphics and a slot-loading SuperDrive for "just" $2600 (ah, Apple). A combo drive version is $2000. The company also bumped the 12" up to 1 GHz (nice) and the 17" to 1.33 GHz, and introduced a Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse.

[ Posted at 8:32 AM | Permalink ]

Sunday, September 14, 2003

Humor: Apple gets a new spokesperson for the PowerMac G5
Thanks to Richard Bottiglieri for the link: Apple has a new spokesperson, Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who notes, "There are NO delays with dual 2 GHz PowerMac G5 shipments. None whatsoever! All back orders have been filled and shipped on time, just like the 17-inch PowerBook. In fact, we are sending extra G5's to all customers just to empty our overflowing warehouses! Thank you, that is all." LOL.

[ Posted at 9:21 AM | Permalink ]