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The Mac mini is a credible performer when running "normal" productivity applications. Unless you are a speed fanatic with demanding, resource hungry applications, you should be very happy with your mini.

But the mini has weak spots. If you play 3D accelerated games, it won't do as well as its siblings ... The biggest weakness is the hard drive speed. As you know, the size, weight, and price design goals dictated that it have a sluggish 4200rpm 2.5 inch drive. If you aren't on a tight budget, I recommend either upgrading to a 5400rpm or 7200rpm drive.

It's a scandal that Apple still considers 256MB as adequate for entry level Macs. They must know better since they send out review units with 512MB. Mac OS X is a virtual memory operating system, but I don't think you want constant virtual memory hits on your mini ... I think your mini will "feel better" if it had 1GB of memory.

Of course, adding drives and memory can drive the price of the mini up quickly. If you don't have a keyboard, mouse, and display already, you can find yourself spending as much as the cost of an iMac G5/1.6 -- which is a faster machine

Hell hath no fury like a Mac user scorned. Run an article about Apple and you usually get a steady trickle of reader comments. Run one that questions or criticises any aspect of Apple strategy, products or leadership and the trickle becomes a deluge. And the accusations of 'Mac bashing' soon follow.

Within the fan base exists a highly vocal minority which tolerates no criticism of its beloved company and attacks any real (or indeed imagined) slight of Apple in online fora with savage intensity.

It's this minority that seems to be under some form of mass hypnosis - perhaps some far-reaching extension of Steve Jobs' 'reality distortion field' - thinking that Apple can do no wrong and is a panacea for all the IT wrongs in the world.

The collective moral outrage does Apple evangelists, and by extension the company itself, no favours. The vitriol seems particularly misplaced in online forums read worldwide by thousands of senior technology professionals and business decision makers holding the IT purse strings.

With its new products, overflowing coffers and über-brand, Apple has the best chance in years of making serious inroads into the corporate space.

Apple has grown up, one can only hope that this particular vocal minority of its fans can follow suit.

After two weeks of writing about Apple's Mac Mini, I have tiny PCs on my brain. This time, it is AMD's Personal Internet Communicator -- a $185 PC that probably ought not to exist at all, but I'm glad it does. The PIC's stated objective is bringing computing to 50 percent of the world's people by 2015, and to do that, AMD is selling the little bugger through third world phone companies and ISPs. I think, with a few modifications, they should sell it here.

The PIC is not a canonical computer, it's an embedded Internet appliance somewhat along the lines of the 3Com Audrey I wrote about a few weeks ago, though without a built-in display. The PIC's strengths and weaknesses are precisely the same, and depend only on what kind of user you are. It can't accept new applications (the OS is Windows CE). It keeps user changes and personal settings on a separate disk partition so that the main OS partition can be updated at any time back to factory settings from a hidden 'factory reload' partition. It has no legacy interfaces at all (just VGA, RJ11 modem, AC'97 audio ports, and four USB 1.1 ports). It has no fan or even any passive ventilation. It has a 366 Mhz AMD Geode processor, 128-megs of SDRAM, and a 10-gig Seagate hard drive. It is ugly. But balancing that it is cheap, cheap, cheap.

Mostafa Hosseini from the Mozilla Calendar project writes:

As some of you may already know, Sunbird/Calendar development on the trunk has gone through a major refactoring in order to provide a much better codebase for proper server support and implementation of various calendar data sources. As the number of major blockers decrease, you may slowly be seeing new nightly builds here and there as well as the start of more frequent official nightly releases. This is to inform you that as much as we need testers and feedback on the new Sunbird/Calendar, we need you to understand that there will be all sorts of regressions, incompatibility, new bugs and possibly confusion ahead for those who upgrade to the nightlies. This shouldn't have been necessary to point out for a product still at its 0.2+ version but the amount of daily usage reports and the amount of calendar data seen to be trusted with Sunbird/Calendar obliges us to do so. So again, before the wave of excitement from a new release leaves you less time to decide, make sure installing and using the new nightlies is what you want and furthermore what you are ready for. It definitely is what we want; yet for those who are content with the current functionality there will be the final 0.2 release to use. In terms of incompatibility the new nightlies will not automatically read and recognize your previous data so it will be up to you to import or re-enter them from scratch. Providing a migrator was not possible since it couldn't have been justified for a 0.2+ version application. To speak about the good side of things, there will be a pretty solid CalDav support thanks to Mike Shaver and his team, a much better iCalendar standard support based on the new interfaces, thanks to Michiel van Leeuwen (mvl), more UI enhancements and hopefully extension and theme support, thanks to Matthew Willis and altogether a great codebase to build upon, thanks to all of our contributors.

Like his original music site MP3.com launched in 1997, Robertson's latest creation, which he is funding with his own money, will offer music in MP3 format, without copyright-protection technology. For the consumer, that means the music can be played on any device that supports the standard and can be copied on an unlimited number of CDs.

Under those conditions, it's not surprising that none of the major record labels have licensed their music to Robertson. Instead, he has built a catalog of 200,000 tracks licensed from small labels and independent artists.

Robertson believes consumers are getting a raw deal with Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes music store ... Songs from iTunes only play on Apple's iPod music player, while the other services' music play only on hardware supporting Microsoft's technology.

"Our message to consumers is, if you pay for music, you should be able to copy it to any device that you want," Robertson said. "There's a paradox today that if you steal your (MP3) music from file-sharing sites, then you can use it anyway you want. But if you pay for the music, then you get it with all kinds of restrictions and limitations.

"That has to turn around to really energize consumers."

Sony Corp. will release its long-awaited PSP portable video game system on March 24 in North America, it said on Thursday, challenging Nintendo's more than 15-year dominance of the handheld video game market with its Game Boy and DS handhelds.

Industry insiders see the PSP as Nintendo's most serious contender yet, though the $250 PSP is targeted at an older market -- teenagers and young men -- than the $80 Game Boy Advance SP and the $150 DS. Handheld sales growth is expected to drive the $10 billion U.S. video game industry this year.

The PSP will come in a "value pack" including accessories and a copy of the movie "Spider-Man 2" on Sony's new UMD disc format, designed for the PSP and capable of holding three times the data of a traditional CD-ROM.

Sony said around 24 titles would be available in the two weeks or so around the launch, representing all of the industry's major game publishers and genres. Some of those games include "FIFA 2005," "Metal Gear Acid," "Need for Speed Rivals" and "Twisted Metal: Head On."

Sony also said it would build 1 million units for sale in North America in its current fiscal year, ending March 31.

Apple Computer proved people will pay 99 cents on the Internet to buy songs one-by-one and own them. Now, a rival company is about to find out how many are willing to pay a flat fee to rent music -- if they can take it with them.

Napster Inc. today officially introduced Napster To Go, a service that is the musical equivalent of a smorgasbord, charging subscribers about $15 a month for access to all the music they care to listen to. Subscription music services like these have been around the Net for years ... [but] Napster To Go adds that critical element: portability. Previous subscription services (including Napster's) restricted users to listening only on their PCs for a simple reason: lack of software that could prevent subscribers from storing permanent copies of their rented songs on portable players, then canceling their subscriptions. Last year, Microsoft Corp. introduced a new version of its copy-protection software that allows subscription services to transfer music to mobile devices, while at the same time preventing subscribers from making permanent copies.

Other companies are planning to follow with similar services, including RealNetworks, Virgin, FYE.com, [and] MusicNet ... If successful, the new options for buying and renting music online could challenge Apple's approach to selling music, which has garnered it upward of 70% of the music-download market.

The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp.

The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software, Mr. Negroponte said during an interview Friday with Red Herring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. AMD is separately working on a cheap desktop computer for emerging markets. It will be sold to governments for wide distribution.

An engineering prototype is nearly ready, with alpha units expected by year’s end and real production around 18 months from now, he said. The portable PCs will be shipped directly to education ministries, with China first on the list. Only orders of 1 million or more units will be accepted.

After posting photos of my apartment a couple weeks ago I got tons of people asking how I made my "Life Poster" seen in this photo. Here are my instructions to create one in about 20-30 min for about $29. Good Luck!

In a move that I would hope should surprise exactly nobody, we're pushing back [Firefox] 1.1 by a little bit because of the realities of the work remaining to be done (I have a lot of patches that need to be landed, tested, bugfixed, there are other patches from other people to which the same applies; also we need a reasonable stabilization period and a resurrection of the l10n infrastructure in order to do a release of similar quality and range to 1.0.) Asa is working on an updated roadmap graphic, which will offer more details. The likely possibility is a 1.1 Developer Preview (= alpha, NOT for general consumption), followed by a 1.1 Preview Release (= beta, wider consumption, feature complete), followed by RCs and a 1.1. We're not fixed on dates yet, but this is just a heads up.

Nicholas Negroponte, the technology guru from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, prowled the halls of the World Economic Forum holding the holy grail for crossing the digital divide: a mock-up of a $100 laptop computer.

The machine is intriguing because Mr. Negroponte has struck upon a remarkably simple solution for lowering the price of the most costly part of a laptop - the display - to $25 or less.

The device includes a tentlike pop-up display that will use the technology now used in today's rear-projection televisions, in conjunction with an L.E.D. light source.

Advanced Micro has been working with a variety of mainstream applications for low-cost computing, ranging from inexpensive Web surfing terminals to digital cash registers.

The PIC, which sells for $185 without a monitor and comes with a stripped-down version of Microsoft Windows, is housed in a rugged sealed case without a fan. The box, which Advanced Micro hopes to shrink to the size of a deck of cards soon, has generated a good deal of interest.

Similar to the last Mac introduction video, someone put up one of Steve Jobs demonstrates NeXTSTEP 3.0, which is really cute. The site has basically been hammered off the grid for the moment, so I've posted a mirror of it ... If you're a Mac user, you'll probably need VLC or MPlayer to view the file. Mirror if you can, and use any mirrors that might be in the comments/trackbacks if you can.