Category Archives: Technology

A Flock of G5s

PowerMac G5It’s hard to know when I can trust myself when it comes to applauding new Apple announcements, but I had that same familiar excitability come over me when Steve Jobs unveiled new PowerMac G5 desktop computers at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference today. From the online images, these new machines look dead sexy — sleek, angular and forbiddingly cool. In a way, they remind me of the industrial design language that informed high-end stereo systems in the 1980s; I’ve also seen a few recent automobile dashboards modeled in this fashion. Maybe it’s time I broke out my stash of skinny ties.

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Rebuild the Desktop

Rice Bowl IconLast Thursday, I dropped off my PowerBook G4 ( Titanium) at Tekserve for a little upgrade. Its original 30GB hard drive had been bursting at the seams for a while, and so I finally bit the bullet, forked over a few hundred dollars and had it replaced with a new, 80GB model. The always-helpful Tekserve technicians encased the old one in a portable FireWire drive so I can still access the data on it, and they gave me a fresh installation of Mac OS X Jaguar on the new one. So today I’m spending the day installing everything from scratch, from applications and utilities to fonts and all of my old documents.

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The Glass Is Half Full

Half-Life 2This 600 megabyte video clip documenting the “Half-Life 2” demonstration at the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo 2003 is ridiculous. What I mean is that it’s an embarrassment of technological riches. This video is ostensibly a preview of this much anticipated video game’s unconscionably advanced depiction of science fiction terror and violence, replete with gorgeously overwrought scene locations, nearly frightening use of artificial intelligence, and an absurdly detailed sense of a world in complete panic.

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The Exploration Is Over

IE for MacThis Friday the Thirteenth turned out to be kind of a bad one for the Macintosh, as today Microsoft confirmed recent rumors that it is discontinuing that platform’s edition of Internet Explorer. This, coupled with the Redmond behemoth’s recent announcements that IE will no longer be a standalone product but will instead be entirely integrated into future versions of the Windows operating system, confirms that the Clinton-era Department of Justice was right to sue for monopoly abuse and that the Bush II-era DOJ was wrong to settle the suit so willingly. This is a decision that surely would never have been made in 1999. (Thanks Ralph Nader!)

With its 95 percent share of the internet browser market, Microsoft’s cancellation of IE amounts to a kind of condemnation of the Mac platform. It remains to be seen whether the strategy that Steve Jobs has pursued with Apple over the past few years — shooting for consumer dollars while half-ignoring the common wisdom that the Mac and Windows machines should be as interoperable as possible — will bear fruit through this unfortunate turn of events. Things don’t look so great, though I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Safari will continue to keep up with the ever-changing demands of the Web browser market.

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’N’ Sync ’n’ Sync ’n’ Sync

iSyncThe latest version of Apple’s iSync will synchronize bookmarks across multiple installations of Safari. So if you have a Macintosh at work and a Macintosh at home and you pay US$100 for Apple’s .Mac service, you can always have your bookmarks handy without even having to think about it. This new iSync feature is an attempt at solving a crucial problem with which I’ve been living for five years, but unfortunately it seems like a case of ‘close but no cigar.’

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Missing Blanks

Blank CD-RsI had one of those moments of consumer rage this morning, when I realized that it’s now virtually impossible to buy blank CD-Rs with nothing on the label side, meaning that if you want to buy some CD-Rs to back up your data or record some music, they will almost certainly feature branding from TDK, Memorex, Sony, Maxxel or some other company. You used to be able to find the kind of discs I’m looking for — you could call them generic CD-Rs — virtually anywhere, but after searching J & R, Circuit City, Best Buy, Staples, DataVision and even a few shady camera/electronics boutiques along Fifth Avenue, I came up with nothing. My guess is that the bigger CD-R manufacturers have shoved the smaller players from the store shelves, or there might be something going on with the RIAA here — maybe it’s easier to prevent the illegal copying of music CDs when the supply of generic CD-Rs is less plentiful? Who knows, but I’m tired of everything being branded when it simply isn’t necessary.

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Think Outside of the Idiot Box

TiVoFor the better part of two years, I’ve been debating whether I should buy myself a TiVo, and as a kind of corollary to that, whether I should subscribe to digital cable television. The first question I always ask myself in trying to resolve this debate is: how much more time am I willing to devote to watching television? The closest I can come to answering that is, “I probably can’t devote much more time, but I’d probably find some way to devote lots more time.” Which begins to explain why I neither own a TiVo nor subscribe to digital cable.

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Call Me on My Gameboy

N-GageIf there’s a holy grail for wireless telecom companies, it’s the successful combination of mobile phones with something, anything else — digital cameras, MP3 players, personal digital assistants, whatever. The idea has a kind of fait accompli quality to it, but attempts to date have failed to yield major successes, at least within the U.S. That may change though with Nokia’s N-Gage, a hybrid mobile phone and gaming system. This is probably the smartest convergent device yet, combining a Symbian OS-based phone, networkable gaming system, Bluetooth, MP3 player… the list goes on and the spec sheet is very impressive. The missing ingredient is the pricing, which has yet to be announced and will be determined by carriers and retailers. If they can bring this thing in under US$500, it’s a winner.

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