Day: April 3, 2003

I installed Red Hat 9 on the 1U server last night, though I think I’m going to try installing Gentoo from scratch just to do a little stress testing on the hardware.

Congrats to Steve Makofsky who is now part of the Microsoft XML Messaging Team.

Sean and Scott:

Apple announced today their plans to put a new G4 Tablet Computer on the market. The unit will be very small, weighing in at just under 2 pounds, and will have a 10 inch screen. The unit will also contain an 80Gb hard drive, and 1Gig of RAM. Video on the unit will be powered by a GeForce4 with 128Mb of Video RAM. Pricing on the unit will run in the $500 to $1000 dollar range, much cheaper than current Windows based units.

Running Mac OS X the unit will have handwriting recognition based off the Inkwell technology. No tests have been done to see how this compares to Windows, but we should know within the month as Steve Jobs has promised to perform the tests himself. I’ve posted a picture of the unit in the discussion forum post for this news item. Overall the unit should be a real kicker; it will be interesting to see how this plays out. [8D]

If they can build this tablet with the specs mentioned above for 500 to 1000 bucks it is going to put some serious pressure on the tablet pc makers.  But I’ll believe it when I see it.

Well, they do know their tablet stuff.  I was expecting it to be posted on the first, but this looks like at least a legit rumor.  I found a mention of it at geek.com on the first, though MacRumors posted about it on March 30.

In related news, the brushed metal look still sucks.

Brent had a scary referrer this afternoon:

http://homeland.fbi.gov/Watchlists/suspect/view.jsp?record=235270

According to Slashdot, the Mozilla roadmap has changed dramatically.  They’re cutting the bloat and embracing the zippiness of Phoenix and Minotaur.

Here’s a great quote from the CNet article:

“Mozilla has become stable but bloated,” said Matt Croydon, an undergraduate in computer science at the University of Maryland. “Users wanted something that was extremely fast, extremely lightweight and stable. I’m glad to see that the Mozilla team is embracing the trend of lightweight and agile browsers. Mozilla is much better off embracing the trend rather than trying to compete with it. It will be interesting to see how this will affect the AOL/Netscape browser, as it builds in more features (bloat) than a default Mozilla install.”

Disclaimer: Of course I’m going to think that it’s a great quote, as it’s a quote by me.  I’ll try not to be as long winded next time.

I am really psyched that Paul Festa sent me an IM this evening asking if I had anything to say on the new roadmap.  He contacted me via IM once before to ask me about that Moblogging thing.

Are we at a tipping point?  Reporters are going to webloggers and geeks in the trenches for the full story.