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About this siteFor 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 Saturday, December 13, 2003Album covers you'll never see on iTunes Music StoreLOL. Good stuff. [ Posted at 10:32 PM | Permalink ]
Friday, December 12, 2003The Mirror’s Crack’dBuzz Anderson does a good job of pointing out the problems with Sun's Project Looking Glass (and its Java Desktop System). But I have to wonder if Buzz understands the irony in his comment about PLG being "mere eye candy" (he works at Apple). That, after all, is my problem with Mac OS X's UI, Aqua, which puts a colorful face on what is essentially an 1980's Mac UI. Surely, we have to move toward more natural UIs like PLG for computers to move to the next level. [ Posted at 4:21 PM | Permalink ] Mozilla Google toolbar and RSS reader panel Another couple of interesting points from the Hofmann interview are: - Google toolbar for Mozilla - RSS Reader Panel - Mozilla Amazon Browser [ Posted at 2:11 PM | Permalink ] Clarifying the Mozilla roadmap In an interview with Digital Web Magazine, Mozilla Foundation's Chris Hofmann discusses when the monolithic Mozilla Web browser suite will give way to the more componentized (read: separate) Firebird and Thunderbird applications. "We hope to get Firebird and Thunderbird to 1.0 next spring and start to promote adoption of those programs," he says. "There is a good bit of work around the extension system and a few other things that we want to get done before 1.0 ... The full Mozilla suite will continue to fill a niche for users that want a fully-integrated browser, mail, IRC, HTML editor, and Web development client for a while ... We have talked to several enterprises and large organizations that have Mozilla deployments in place, or are considering them. The stable, full Mozilla suite provides a good, low-cost solution to their needs." Interestingly, Hofmman also discusses Longhorn, which will even more closely integrate IE with Windows than XP. "We are working up a high-level response to Longhorn in the upcoming roadmap, which you should see soon ... It would have been nice if Microsoft would have adopted XUL as its XML user-interface language instead of re-inventing the wheel. We are pushing forward with getting XUL adopted as a W3C standard, and more people are using it to develop all kinds of interesting Internet applications. The combination of Mozilla’s Web services capabilities and XUL offers a pretty compelling set of tools." [ Posted at 2:10 PM | Permalink ] Battlestar Galactica #1 The excellent new "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries scored the Sci-Fi channel's best ratings for 2003, and the third-best ratings in the channel’s history. This is good news for anyone hoping to see it turn into a full-fledged series. [ Posted at 1:47 PM | Permalink ] Supposed PS3 picture a fake Thanks Erik: The PlayStation 3 concept image I mentioned earlier is apparently fake, according to Gamespot and other sources. "This mock-up was created by 23-year-old Julien Vanhoenacker, who often goes by the name of Kanex. Kanex originally presented his portfolio containing the image to his small design studio site. And no, this talented graphic artist is not affiliated with Sony in any way. He just happened to be bored and created a fairly believable design." [ Posted at 1:40 PM | Permalink ] Child abuse? Mac advocate Bill Palmer has posted a bizarre article about creating a "Mac User Group at your K-12 School." Is he insane? Why do children need to subjected to the whims of members of a computer (any kind of computer) user group? How about funneling all that Mac-loving energy to things our kids really need, like better nutrition, more outdoor activities, and social activities that don't involve technology? Bill's so concerned about getting 'em while they're young ("It takes a lot of hard work, but trust me, it can be done," he writes, breathlessly, about the process of converting children to the Mac) that he doesn't see the bigger picture. It's not always about Mac advocacy, clown. Don't mess with children. [ Posted at 1:35 PM | Permalink ] Open source's local heroes OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead Sam Hiser sends word that Open Source software has finally broken through to the mainstream business readership in The Economist. In article called Open source's local heroes, The Economist relates the growth of open source solutions in developing countries such as China, South Korea, India, and Brazil, where money is tight and proprietary software is on the wane. Interesting reading. [ Posted at 1:15 PM | Permalink ] ZDNET: Five reasons not to buy an iPod As the owner of two iPods (an original 5 MB model and a newer 30 GB "dock" model), I have a love-hate relationship with the cool little guys. Here's another take on what's wrong with the iPod. According to ZD, what it boils down to is the following five issues, all very true: 1. Six-plus hours of battery life is not always enough. 2. Jogging with a hard drive-based player is not cool. 3. The iPod is expensive. 4. You want to make high-quality digital recordings. 5. You want a choice in online music stores. "If you don't care about low battery life, aren't fond of jogging, have ample disposable income, don't need to record/encode music portably, and want to purchase music downloads only from the iTunes Music Store, then the iPod is the best the way to go," Eliot Van Buskirk writes. "While not ideal for some niche activities, it's still hands down the best-designed MP3 player in the world." He's right. But I'd add a few more reasons: 6. The non-standard UI of iTunes for Windows is hard to get used to. (iTunes, like the iPod, also doesn't support WMA.) We need choice here too, not just for music stores. 7. Buying an Apple product says something about you, and it's usually not complimentary. In other words, these people often display a superior air I find hard to take. That said, I still like and recommend the iPod and consider it to be the best portable audio player out there, though the Dell DJ looks like formidable competition with 20 hours of battery life (!!!), WMA compatibility, and much, much lower prices than the iPod. [ Posted at 12:19 PM | Permalink ] Panther PDF jab unfounded? Thanks Dave: Someone named Leonard Rosenthol (update: He's a Mac software developer) has written a follow-up to the recent PDFZone editorial, refuting the claim that Panther's PDFs are lousy. The argument seems to boil down to semantics, naturally. (Specifically what is "pretty-worthy"?) Rosenthal uses a fairly business-like way of measuring this qualification, by determining whether Panther's PDFs adhere to the ISO PDF Presspress standard, PDF/X. "Given PDF/X compliance as the standard for 'press-worthy,' I will state that it is possible to create 'press-worthy' PDFs from Panther DIRECTLY FROM the 'Save as PDF' feature and WITHOUT the need for third-party tools," Rosenthol writes (emphasis his). But... and this is a big "but," frankly, Rosenthal then apparently refutes his own claims by noting that Adobe applications have processing technology that sends documents through various filters to achieve true prepress quality. It turns out this feature is actually in Panther too, but it's hidden in the ColorSync utility and has to be enabled before "Save As PDF" will use them. In other words, out of the box, Panther does not appear to make press-worthy PDFs as alleged, but can be made to do so. To harp on my earlier "inductive UI" theme, it's not discoverable. So I'm glad to hear it's possible. It should be easier. [ Posted at 12:02 PM | Permalink ]
Thursday, December 11, 2003Attacks on Linux mountA CNET report on the recent spate of attacks on Linux projects notes, "during the last four months, unknown intruders have breached the security around servers hosting programs and code published by the Linux kernel development team, the Debian Project, the Gentoo Linux Project and the GNU Project, which manages the development of many important programs used by Linux and other Unix-like systems. The attacks have convinced open-source project leaders to take another look at their security." Here's a thought. Maybe these open source project leaders could make an announcement that they are going to rearchitect their projects around security, halt new software development for three months to hunt for security bugs, and then ensure that all new releases going forward are secure by design, by default, and in deployment. I even have a snappy name for this initiative. They could call it "Trustworthy Computing." And once they do this, rallying the hundreds of thousands of open source developers to their cause, they could snidly make fun of Microsoft for not "getting" security. [ Posted at 12:53 PM | Permalink ] PC Magazine: Macs Are Not Invulnerable "Windows Isn’t the Only System With Serious Flaws," write Lance Ulanoff, whose email will be hilarious for the next few days. "The truth is that the Mac OS is just as vulnerable as Microsoft Windows. Overall, maybe OS X is better than Windows, but that's not the point. Panther, for example, is a great OS, but it's also complex, and complexity leaves room for gaps — some small, some not." He should have taken it a bit further. Truthfully, OS X is solid, and I love its UI that requires users to logon to perform admin-level tasks, but it's still not as secure as Windows XP. Here's why: Apple fans boast that OS X is more secure because it's based on UNIX, which they note has been proven in the real world for years. But here's the (huge) problem with that argument, a problem that's immediately obvious if you know anything about computer science. UNIX was hacked and attacked for years by hackers, but most of this occured before the late 1990's. Since then, hackers have focused on Windows, the predominant operating system. But here's the thing: There are far more hackers now then there were in the 1970's, 1980's or early 1990's, they are far more sophisticated, and they have this wonderful global network, which they access at astonishing broadband speeds, over which they can discover vulnerabilities, new hacks, new tools, and people to discuss techniques with in real time. This is the world Windows grew up in, and there is no OS on the planet that's been hacked or attacked as much as Windows as a result. And the only reason that hackers don't attack OS X, quite obviously, is that few people would even notice; it's a small market already eclipsed by Linux. Speaking of Linux, some open source folks like to deridingly call the closed system security of Windows "security by obscurity" but OS X's security could likewise be described as "security by inactivity." If no one uses a system, no one will hack it; there's no reason to. This is a lesson Linux advocates are just now learning, as Linux usage grows, and Linux hacks increase (and incidentally, Linux hacks already outpace Windows hacks). Put succinctly, the Windows "security problem" is a red herring. Hackers attack Windows because it's number one. End of story. [ Posted at 12:36 PM | Permalink ] Project Gutenberg: 10,000 eBooks and counting And people complain there aren't any good eBooks. Well, Project Gutenberg just published its 10,000th free eBook and, to celebrate, has published an .ISO image of over 9,500 of them, perfect for burning to disk. Good stuff. Fun fact: Book #10,000 was, of course, "The Magna Carta." [ Posted at 12:27 PM | Permalink ]
Wednesday, December 10, 2003Ah yes. The first "2004 will be the year of Linux" storyEvery year now, for several years, some putz, pundit, or reporter will boldly proclaim that "[insert year here] will be the year of Linux" as if the entire world were somehow poised to drop Windows and adopt Linux. They said in 1997. In 1998. And in every year since. Heck, two years ago, even I was sure it was going to happen. And yet here we are on the cusp of 2004 and it's still a pipe dream. Unless of course you're Eric Hellweg a CNN/Money Contributing Columnist, who's recent article, Looking at Linux in 2004 boldly proclaims, yet again, that "next year could be the breakout year for the open-source operating system." Unintentional humor? Pretty much. [ Posted at 10:18 PM | Permalink ] Making lemonade The fine folks at MacCentral deserve some credit for positive spin. As I demonstrated yesterday, Apple's revelation that it has sold 20 million songs from iTunes isn't necessarily good news, since that figure can be used to extrapolate their average daily sales over time, and their sales are way, way down, almost as low as they were before Apple opened iTunes to Windows users. In other words, there's no good news here. But back to MacCentral. What was their headline for their article touting this event? "iTunes Music Store: 20 million served and growing." Apparently the "and growing" part refers to total sales, since 20 million is more than the 17 million figure the company revealed last month. But by any believable statistic, Apple's iTunes isn't growing, it's "slowing" or "shrinking," if you consider that the total number of downloads per month, or per user, are falling. And the words "grow" and "growth" are never actually used in the body of the article in relation to iTunes, which is, of course, telling. [ Posted at 10:22 AM | Permalink ] Apple finally acknowledging PowerBook screen problems How would you feel if you bought a brand new 15-inch PowerBook for an expensive $2000 or more, only to see it develop annoying white spots on the screen over time? Well, chances are that's exactly what happened to you if you did buy such a notebook, because Apple added little spacers behind the screen to keep the aluminum casing from warping during normal use, and they're pressed right up against the display panel, causing the spots. Well, months later, Apple is finally acknowledging the manufacturing mistake, albeit in a wonderfully cautious way. Check out this statement: "The new 15-inch PowerBook has been a big hit with customers since its introduction last month. However, some customers are reporting the appearance of faint, white spots on their displays after using the system for a short period of time, and Apple is investigating these reports right now. Any customers experiencing this problem should contact AppleCare." See? It's not really a problem, so stop complaining. :) [ Posted at 10:15 AM | Permalink ] Cheap new iMacs on tap Apple's current generation iMacs are cool-looking but let's face it, they're way too expensive considering you can get home PCs for well less than $1000 (and don't get me started on performance; I have Pentium III laptops that outperform my 1 GHz G4-based iMac-17). In a bid to lower costs (and, presumably) the retail price) of its next-generation iMac, Apple is turning to low-cost magnesium (which it will no doubt claim is the "strongest material on earth) and lots of plastic, according to the Digi-Times. "The next generation of the 'New iMac' that Apple Computer is going to launch in the first quarter of next year will have a magnesium-alloy case and a high proportion of plastic parts for cost reduction, according to sources in Taiwan’s IT industry," the article reads. "Apple uses a stainless steel and zinc alloy to manufacture its current generation of New iMacs, the sources said. The sources said Apple was forced to modify its strategy as sales of the New iMac desktops have been lackluster due to higher prices." In two years, Apple has sold barely 1 million of the current-generation iMacs, a sales rate less than half of the previous generation. Clearly, cool design takes second place to price when it comes to consumers. [ Posted at 10:06 AM | Permalink ]
Tuesday, December 09, 2003Project Looking GlassIf you're interested in the 3D UI work that's going into Longhorn and, to a lesser extent, the Mac OS, you really need to check out this fascinating video of a Sun executive demonstrating Project Looking Glass, a future user interface (it's unclear what this runs on) that will ostensibly compete with Windows. There's nothing we haven't seen in Longhorn--the "notes" feature looks like it was stolen straight from Office "Longhorn" 12's "Sticky Notes" for example--but it's still attractive and thought-provoking. Too bad the speaker wanders off into la-la land. "Innovation on the desktop is definitely possible," Sun VP Jonathan Swartz says. "The dominant company that provides the desktop doesn't want to show you that because they don't want to do the work that will reinvent the way things are done. They want to keep it the way its been done for the past ten years." Looks like someone didn't make it to this year's PDC: Nothing in this demo is "better" that what we've seen of Longhorn, and much of it looks suspiciously similar to Longhorn, as I noted. Here are some still images:   
[ Posted at 4:40 PM | Permalink ]
Another reason to love Europe They're fighting noise. [ Posted at 4:21 PM | Permalink ] Mozilla 1.6 beta released What will hopefully be the last version of the "classic" Mozilla Web browser suite has entered the beta stage with the release today of Mozilla 1.6 Beta. New to this version are new cross-platform NTLM authentication support (previously this was Windows-only), fixes for several security-related bugs, the return of the "Translate Page" functionality, and new version of Chatzilla. You can find out more with the official release notes and download the product from the Mozilla Web site. [ Posted at 4:02 PM | Permalink ] iTunes sales dropping significantly as holidays near In the Steve Jobs Rolling Stone interview I mentioned yesterday, his Royal RealityFieldness casually noted that the total number of songs sold on the iTunes Music Store rose to over 20 million downloads, up from 17 million in early November. That sounds great, but a cursory examination of Apple's publicly-revealed sales figures and the dates of those announcements reveals that iTunes sales are actually falling through the floor. This is particularly amazing because the service is now open to a much wider range of users since the company opened it up to Windows users, which account for about 95 percent of all computer users. On October 20, shortly after the Windows version of iTunes was released, Apple said it had sold over 15 million songs, or an average of 285,714 songs per day since the previous sales announcement. On November 6, the company revealed it had sold 17 million songs, or an average of 250,000 songs per day, a slight drop. But this week's sales figures reveal that average daily sales have dropped dramatically, to just 93,750 songs a day. What does this mean? Well, it suggests that most people who tried the service downloaded a few songs and then never returned. Apple hasn't seen attrition that high since it switched its free iTools service to the paid .Mac service over a year ago, and it represents a significant challenge for the company, since it's still losing money on iTunes and is facing significant competition for its popular iPod. Here are how Apple's average daily sales have tracked since the service was first launched in April 2003. Note that they're almost down to the level they were at before Windows users jumped on board. Not good.  Expert: Panther's PDFs are a joke Apple has been pushing the integrated PDF functionality in Mac OS X since it was called Rhapsody, but a leading PDF expert says Apple's claims about the quality of the PDFs you can create in OS X are dangerously misinformed. Julie Shaffer, the director of the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (GATF)'s Robert Howard Center for Imaging Excellence and co-author of the GATF’s PDF Print Production Guide, tells PDFZone that OS X is incapable of making print-ready PDFs, contrary to claims Apple has repeatedly made. "In a presentation at the PDF Conference in Anaheim, CA, last month," the article reads, "she demonstrated how 'Jaguar makes a crummy PDF file,' as Shaffer put it. Worse yet, she said, Apple was telling designers otherwise. 'I was on one of the online forums, and I was quite mortified to see a representative of Apple saying that the ‘Save As PDF’ makes PDF files exactly the same as printing PostScript,' Shaffer said. 'This was on a forum. I have captured this, because this is misinformation of the highest level coming from Apple itself.' And then she went on to prove it. Side by side, she showed two PDF versions of a GATF brochure—one done with the Jaguar 'Save as PDF' command, and one exported from QuarkXPress 6, a prepress-worthy version made with the Jaws engine ... '[The OS X version] killed my logo. It's not viable for print,' Shaffer concluded. 'Sorry, Apple.'" And what about Panther? After all, Apple has raised the PDF rhetoric in this release. "When PDFs are made the intuitive Mac way—in this case, using the 'Save As PDF' button in the 'Print' dialog box that comes up in every Mac application ... they have the same problems with resolution shifting and color-space shifting [as Jaguar does] ... 'I just don’t know how much Panther is going to impact us in the print-production environment,' [she said]. Sorry, Apple." [ Posted at 12:13 PM | Permalink ]
Monday, December 08, 2003Rumor: Microsoft to launch new Office, Virtual PC at MacWorld SFOAppleInsider reports that Microsoft will officially renew its commitment to the Macintosh platform on January 6th with the introduction of new versions of Microsoft Office and Virtual PC for the Macintosh. "Microsoft Office 2004 for the Macintosh--currently in development under the moniker 'Office 11 for Mac'--is just one of four new Mac OS X native products under construction by Microsoft's Mac Business unit, sources close to the company said," the report reads. "The office suite will center around a new project management system, which will closely integrate its individual applications to provide a revolutionary means of organization. Users working on a joint project in both Word and PowerPoint will be able to link documents from the two applications through the Office project manager, which also extends to e-mail messages related to the project ... According to sources, the Entourage component of Office 2004 will see some of the heftiest revisions, including greatly improved junk mail filtering and support for project-based message organization ... The office suite will include updates to all of its component applications and is rumored to feature a broad form of Unicode support across the board. As with the previous version of Office for the Mac, version 2004 will also boast several Macintosh only features due to its development cycle, which is independent from its Windows counterpart ... the suite is not expected to ship until later in the Spring of 2004 ... Virtual PC 7.0, also due for an announcement at January's expo, will finally deliver optimized performance for Apple's PowerPC G5 processor, sources said. In addition, the emulation software will provide improved support of the Windows operating system and Windows-based applications. Both MSN Messenger 4.0 and Remote Desktop Connection Client 2 for Mac should make their way to market in the first half of 2004, sources said. Specific details of the two applications are currently unavailable." [ Posted at 2:54 PM | Permalink ] Discussing UI complexities I've been ranting against complex UIs for a long time (though I tend to focus more on usability aspects like "discoverability" where a feature is useless if you don't know it exists and can't find out about it easily) and it's nice to see someone else starting to think about this stuff as well. The iPod is successful for a few reasons, but one of them is the simplicity of its UI, which blows away virtually everything else on the market. Sadly, as they add ever more functionality to the iPod, we're starting to replace that ease of use with an ever-increasingly complex experience. But it's still a good example of UI done right. Now if Apple could just take that much care with its desktop OS, maybe it would have a true contender to Windows on its hand. God knows Linux will never get there. [ Posted at 11:14 AM | Permalink ] Steve Jobs, the Rolling Stone interview Steve Jobs is interviewed by Rolling Stone, which does a credible if somewhat fawning job of dealing with the biggest head in Silicon Valley. But some of the comments Jobs makes are simply mind-bending, like his hyprocritical remarks about stealing ("it's just wrong to steal ... Or let's put it this way: It is corrosive to one's character to steal") and his subtle admission that Dell will soon start outselling the iPod (" We will ship way more digital-music players than Dell this quarter [Emphasis mine --Paul]. Way more. In the long run, we're going to be very competitive ... Dell's distribution model works against them when they get into consumer electronics." And his comments about how ingrained the Mac is with the creative industry ("as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac -- it's recorded on a Mac, it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork's done on a Mac. Almost every artist I've met has an iPod, and most of the music execs now have iPods ... we are perceived [another subtle admission, again, emphasis mine --Paul] by the music industry as the most creative technology company") sort of shows where his head is at: Most music customers--you know, the people actually buying the music--use and will continue to use Windows PCs, not Macs. Comparing the size of that audience to the creative market is like, well, comparing the size of the Windows world to that of the Mac world. And while it explains why iTunes Music Store was able to get off the ground, it also nicely skips around a bigger issue: Why the iTunes Music Store will slowly slip into irrelevance over time as more PC services come on board. Because if there's one thing music executives care (a lot) more about than "creativity," it's money. [ Posted at 11:04 AM | Permalink ] Obi Wan Bond? Apparently, Ewan McGregor of STAR WARS fame is mulling over the role of James Bond, which will be vacant when Pierce Brosnan retires his Aston Martin after the next bond film. Hmm... [ Posted at 10:08 AM | Permalink ] Set your TiVo, it's Galactica time Tonight at 9:00 pm EST, the Sci-Fi Channel is debuting its two-part Battlestar Galactica mini-series. I watched an hour-long promo piece for the show last week and it looks solid, with great special effects and some understandable updating over the original. Not to be missed. [ Posted at 10:06 AM | Permalink ] We got whacked As expected, this weekend's storm was a record-setter, with over 30 inches of snow in my own yard and up to three feet of the white stuff in various parts of New England, which was the hardest-hit area, as usual. But you gotta love how fans of the New England Patriots reacted during Sunday's 12-to-0 victory against the biggest rival, the Miami Dolphins (in which the Patriots clinched the AFC East Championship and secured home field advantage for the play-offs). Here are my favorite pictures of the celebration, which is a classic example of taking a bad situation (over 30 inches of snow in the stadium) and turning it into a balls-out good time:   On a related note, check out the history of snow removal. [ Posted at 10:02 AM | Permalink ] Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Released From Mozillazine.org: Following two release candidates, the 0.4 release of Mozilla Thunderbird is now available. Thunderbird 0.4 features an updated look to Thunderbird's default theme, including a variety of new icons; better OS integration, cut and paste of images on Windows, and a number of bug fixes and other new features. Builds are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, while other platforms and configurations should be available in the near future. The Thunderbird Release Notes have more information, along with the Thunderbird project page on mozilla.org. [ Posted at 9:53 AM | Permalink ]
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