Category: Web Services

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.

CNet:

Next-generation cell phone networks are arriving in Africa, a region some carriers view as an enormous business opportunity, despite widespread poverty.

This just in.  The vast majority of phones in the US still suck.

Here are links to several RSS feeds from Dave:

• Apple has four new RSS feeds. Thanks to Steven Garrity for the pointer.
• Fast Company has an RSS feed too. Bing!
• Cisco Systems has 12 new RSS feeds. Latest News Releases, Content Networking, Partner, Routing, Security, Software, Standards, Storage Networking, Switching, Voice, Wireless, Features.

I’m teetering on the edge of information overload, so I don’t know if I can afford to subscribe to any of these.  When I started weblogging, I tried to get my hands on as many primary sources as possible (Currently monitoring 243 sources).  I would filter out the drek and report to the world my findings.  Nowadays I have to rely on other webloggers, most of them more intelligent than I, to filter through the drek and report back to me what they have found.

Finding the intersection of primary sources and intelligent analysis is key.

TheServerSide:

In a recent interview, Cape Clear CEO Annrai O’Toole criticizes appserver vendors for convincing people you need fancy orchestration and transaction mangement services (of an appplication server) to build service oriented architectures/web services. He also claims that javascript is all you need to maintaining workflow and transactional integrity.

That’s right kids.  All you really need to host web services are a box and some free software.  You can put together XML-RPC, SOAP, or REST services with Perl or Python through CGI.  You can run Apache Axis on top of Tomcat or another free server.  Things don’t need to be as thick or as complicated as you are making it.  Take a step back and stop spending so much money.

Wired News reports on the iBox, a potential $250-$350 barebones Apple-compatible platform assembled from replacement motherboards.  I’ve wanted a low-cost entry into OSX for some time now, but my 8500 doesn’t take it, I haven’t found an iMac cheap enough, and the G3/G4 towers are still a little too expensive for me.

The design of the box itself is very good.  It almost looks like it was born at 1 Infinite Loop.

LWN:

In accordance with our errata support policy the Red Hat Linux 6.2 and Red Hat Linux 7 distributions have now reached their end-of-life for errata maintenance. This means that we will no longer be producing security, bugfix, or enhancement updates for these products.

Erik Hatcher on dress code:

Make your impressions with the code!

Kerneltrap:

Jeff Roberson recently announced a new 1:1 threading implementation that has been merged into FreeBSD -current. The effort builds upon the work done so far on KSE [story], offering SMP scalability and working proof of KSE’s design. Jeff explains, “This code works in parallel with KSE and does not break it in any way. It actually helps bring M:N threading closer by testing out shared bits.“

Clemens Vasters:

Get over RPC. Think messages. Get over coding and programming models. Think data.

Keith Devens:

Via BitWorking, MSDN has RSS feeds!

Dave Winer:

I think open source is to programming as pro bono work is to lawyers. Programmers are by their nature generous beings. But we also have mortgages, need health insurance, have kids who want to go to Harvard, and occasionally want to take a vacation (I know that’s unreasonable).

He will be keynoting the conference which runs that runs May 28-30.

When will people start linking to weblogs that they happen to own BlogShares of?

I put up a page about my new rackmount server.  I know that it’s sad, but I did it anyway.

I wasn’t able to start downloading Red Hat 9 on my BitTorrent-optimized machine until this morning.  I’m currently pulling down about 130k/s and giving back about 15-20k/s.  I’m about halfway done and I’m going to keep BitTorrent open so that I can share it with the rest of you.

I bought a set of FRS radios (they used to be called walkie talkies) yesterday.  I ended up buying BellSouth Communicator 2260’s, which has 14 channels of FRS as well as 8 GMRS channels.  The catch is that the FCC requires you to obtain a license in order to transmit in GMRS.

Why do I know this?  Mostly because I read the little tiny writing on the back of the box, and also checked out the documentation that came with the units.  I can assure you that the casual user probably would have done neither, choosing instead to rip the packaging open and start transmitting on all 22 channels.  Which is illegal.

I will admit that BellSouth probably does the bare minimum required to inform users that they need a license in order to transmit on channels 15 to 22.  It was on the back of the packaging (somewhere near the bar code I think) and in at least 3 places in the paper documentation.  I really think that something more visible should be required.  A sticker on the back of the unit that you have to remove in order to put batteries in.

Here’s another ugly thing: FCC Form 605 is 27 pages long including instructions.  Any bets on the percentage of people that own this GMRS device and operate on GMRS frequencies that bothered filling out Form 605?  Did I mention that each license will cost you a $14.50 filing charge?  Allow me to ask again what percentage of GMRS users will have taken this step.  The probable number of users who are using handsets legally are beginning to approach zero.

I used the radios yesterday, but told my friends to make sure that we stayed within channels 1-14.  I will probably end up sending in the paperwork for a GMRS license, more out of priciple than anything else.

Running into this makes me wonder how many products there are out there that similarly require you to obtain a license, but assume that you will operate without one.

OSNews has a great interview with Miguel de Icaza:

Miguel de Icaza of Ximian tells all about Mono, .NET and dotGNU, Gnome and its relationship to KDE, and much more.

Slashdot dupes stories even on April Fools Day.

Matthew Langham:

And it’ll bulge your pocket for sure.