Day: March 12, 2003

Rael reports that Jeff Bezos survived a helicopter crash.

Gizmodo:

Bluetooth’s just barely gotten a foothold in the world of technology, and already Intel, Sony, Philips, Texas Instruments, Samsung and others are working on a new wireless standard to replace it. There’s no catchy name for it yet (just the designation 802.15.3a) but it’ll use ultra wideband and be 100 times faster than Bluetooth.

I object on the grounds that I haven’t been able to purchase ANYTHING that is bluetooth enabled yet.  No phones, PCs, cameras, nothing.  I know they are out there.  I could pick up a T68i and a bluetooth USB adapter.  I’m sure there are a handful of other bluetooh-enabled devices out there.  I’m a fairly gatget-aware person, perhaps my budget is the problem.

Bluetooth hasn’t frickin’ penetrated the marketplace yet.  Let’s replace it.

Not.

(Aparently some things have to scroll by twice before they register with me)

I don’t speak Hungarian, but Mobloggolas looks like it covers the basics of the Wired/CNet/Slashdot piece that was floating around.  It was published March 1, though somehow I had not noticed it in my logs until now.

I was happy to see that they used one of my screenshots later in the article.

CNet has a roundup of Intel Centrino and Pentium M laptops:

From the start, notebook vendors have raced to speed up their notebooks but almost always at the expense of battery life: faster processors meant limited time away from an outlet. Thankfully, times change. Rather than throwing more megahertz at computing tasks, Intel’s new Pentium M processor, which makes its long-awaited debut today, significantly increases notebook battery life. One notebook we tested–IBM’s ThinkPad T40–hit the seven-hour mark.

There are also seperate reviews of the seven models.  The first three are Centrinos, they run Pentium M’s with the 855 chipset, and they have Intel’s wireless pro (802.11b) chipset:

• Toshiba Tecra M1: 1.6 Pentim M, 60 gig hard drive, DVD burner, bluetooth, 5 hour battery life.
• Acer TravelMate 803LCi: 1.6, 60 gigs, 512 megs RAM, 64 meg video card, 15 inch screen.
• Gateway 450: 1.6GHz PM, 60gigs, 256megs,32 megs ATI M7.  It’s light, thin and sexy.  They have an entry level model for $1499

The rest of the pack runs Pentium M but not one of Intel’s other required components.  Consider this corporate BS more than anything else.  Anything that runs Pentium M should have pretty swet battery life:

• Compaq Evo N620c: 1.5GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs, 32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 7500.
• Dell Inspiron 600m: 1.6GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs, 64 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000.
• Dell Latitude D600: 1.6GHz PM, 40 gigs, 512megs,  32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000.
• IBM Thinkpad T40: 1.6GHz PM, 80 gigs (4200RPM drive tho), 512 megs, 32 megs ATI Mobility Radeon 9000. 

There is also a product comparison chart that does a really good job at not actually comparing the models.  Also, if you click on the ‘specs‘ tab of the review, you don’t actually get any specs.  You just get a few disclaimers.  Haha, joke is on you.

Overall I was quite dissapointed with CNet.  I had major user interface issues and the complete lack of any information beyond superficial oohs and aahs pissed me off to no end.  In order to find out basic specs on these machines, I had to scroll down to the bottom of the ‘battery life’ page of several reviews.  Blegh.

It looks like the Pentium M computers will be $300-500 more expensive than their P4m counterparts.  That’s okay though.  If I can get 5-7 hours on a standard battery with a small sleek laptop, I think it’s worth a few extra bucks.  I would definately like to see a more detailed roundup done by one of the more hardware oriented sites.  How it looks is only a portion of what is important.

John Burkhardt on Mitch Kapor’s exit from Groove:

It is a tough issue and one that I’ve struggled with personally.  I have no details, nor will I, of what exactly Poindexter is doing with Groove.  But I don’t quite see it as the same moral dilema as that of creating the atom bomb.  From our perspective we are building collaboration software.  What people end up collaborating about is their business – not ours.  Maybe that’s niave.  Its hard for me to know where to draw the line.  Should Bjarne worry that the project uses c++?  Should Tim Berners Lee worry that it uses html?  What if it uses email?  The telephone?  SQL?  Groove provides a secure and decentralized communications infrastructure.  It doesn’t specifically help the government spy on us.

Every time I chat with Kenneth Hunt, it’s like a realtime weblogging linkfest experience.

Kenneth jogged my memory about LinuxWorld Expo.  I spoke to a couple of Sun guys pimping JXTA software, and they showed me a really slick Groove-like collab app.  It’s called Momentum by InView Software.  It’s not quite as portable as the Sun guys led me to believe, it’s currently only available for Windows, though a Linux version is due out soon.  Theoretically it should run on any platform with a decent JRE.  It could even run on OSX in theory.

When I really get serious about learning Japanese, Kenneth suggests Pimsleur.

He also motivated me into playing around with speex and speexdec.  Pretty amazing for the crazy compression rates.