I agree with Engadget’s take on the MacBook Air: “Give us the lovechild of the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, and it’s all over.”
Cool, good design, not for me (I need audio in, ethernet, optical drive, and more USB ports, so I need a different class of laptop in the first place). Eagerly awaiting the new MacBook / MacBook Pro lines rumored for launch in a few weeks.
Bill Gates wrote a short editorial for BBC News giving his view of the software industry and the factors that influence it.
I find his view of software development as a social process, rather than a solitary one, both intriguing and encouraging.
Also I would hope that more of our cultural and political leaders would start to share his view that a strong understanding of math and science are crucial to success, no matter who you are. (I make no claims to expertise here- I took brief calculus twice and my last science class was a blow-off class called “Insects, Science, and Society”.)
A week or so back I put XP back on my machine and noticed how much faster it was compared with Vista on 1GB of RAM.
Today I upgraded to 2.5GB and Vista is screaming. Not that different from XP, either.
Last week, Apple announced the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone minus the phone. It still has Wi-Fi internet, so as long as you’re in a hotspot, you can browse and stuff.
I ordered it the day it was announced – $399 for 16GB (I sold my fifth-gen one on eBay, so don’t think that I just waste tons on iPods nonstop). They kept it with flash instead of the hard drive that I was hoping for. At first I was worried about it and considered going for the comparatively lame hard-drive model, but then I sorted my iTunes library by date last played, and found out that I’ve listened to like 10GB worth of music since about….May. So I went ahead and made the order thinking that I could keep the rest of my ~50GB collection on my laptop.
In the week after I pre-ordered the iPod Touch, I realized that there was little difference between the $399 iPod Touch and the $399 iPhone. (the Touch has 8GB more storage, the iPhone…. um, has a phone.) I’d been planning on picking up a smartphone from Verizon in six months or so when they give me a discount, but I got down to thinking about saving more in the long run by just going with the iPhone.
So I did that. I bought myself an 8GB iPhone yesterday. It lives up to all of the hype – it’s friggin’ awesome.
Most of all, I got it for the mobile internet- both WiFi (without having to lug my laptop) and over CingularAT&T’s painfully slow EDGE network. The $50 a month I was paying just for voice simply wasn’t worth it to me – and now I pay $60, and it includes unlimited data usage (Verizon is about $80 for the same thing).
So overall, it’s awesome, except for a couple of tiny details:
Chances are 80% that I’ll keep it. We’ll see.
So I’ve done a good deal of bouncing around Operating Systems for the last year. Since July 2006, I’ve run the following OS distributions on my laptop:
A lot of these installations have come from a geeky curiosity of how another OS would work for me. From a technical perspective, I could probably get by with any of these, but when I think about the OS as something that actually enables me to do “real stuff,” Vista Ultimate is leaps and bounds in front of everything else. Simple things, like indexed desktop search, live window previews, automatic file backup, and good dual monitor support reduce the “technology barriers” between my work and me. (I also have seen zero “blue screens of death” since installing Vista Ultimate)
That said, there are a lot of things I want from the other OSes I’ve tried. Windows still lacks a unified package manager that both installs and updates all of my software – so I have to remember whether my program gets automatic updates from Windows Update, Microsoft Update (yes, there is a difference between the two), Apple Software Updater, a standalone updater, or if I just need to remember to check the application’s website. Vista also has much of XP’s bloat and greed for system resources, which many don’t notice, but when I load Linux on my system, I get an amazing performance kick.
The most tempting thing to switch to would be Ubuntu Linux or Mac OS X, but Ubuntu still is missing a few crucial features (notably user-friendly configuration and good dual monitor support) and OS X requires me to drop $500 more than I would for a PC.
Basically, right now there is no “best OS” out there for my purposes. Ubuntu is really getting close. But I fear that Microsoft’s strength has locked me into their platform for all of my productivity software (Office, Adobe Creative Suite, FL Studio)
I guess to sum it all up, I’m happy with Vista Ultimate, but can’t wait to see something even better.
My 20″ Widescreen came in today. Sometime in the future it will belong to a desktop that I plan to build, but in the meantime, I am running it in a dual-monitor setup with the 14.1″ screen on my laptop.
The monitor itself is great… I got it for a steal and at 1650×1080 resolution, the thing is positively gigantic.
But it really brings out the weaknesses in my laptop. The thing isn’t designed for graphical prowess in the first place – Intel GMA 950 internal graphics are fine for the 1200×800 built-in screen, and I am really quite lucky that the thing supports Aero Glass in the first place. It even runs a dual monitor at 1280×1024 without even a hiccup. But if I go dual with my new beast, say goodbye to Aero, and say hello to Fisher-Price-reminiscent Vista Basic.
It’s OK. Aero works when I only have the big monitor turned on, and it’s like a 6″ upgrade from the built-in screen, so it’s still great.
But even when it’s only running this one monitor, my internal graphics really take a plunge.s Stuff moves around slowly and anything graphics-intensive is a lot slower. And then I get this nasty guy while playing a DVD:
Thank you very much, Windows Vista! This is a standard DVD (none of the crazy copy protection in HD-DVD or Blu-Ray) that I own, and am trying to play on my own monitor. Luckily, I have better video programs, but this is still an unacceptable nuscience.
Anybody want to give me $500 so I can get this?
Yep. It’s a computer inside of a drum shell.
Oh, if only it were cheaper.
I just finished making my dad’s website. I’m pretty proud of it, since it’s the first design from scratch that I’ve done in about two years. It’s nice to see that i’ve improved in that time.
I’m thinking about getting a bit more serious about web design stuff. I might launch a little design service for artists and small businesses in northern Colorado. I have to ponder naming, how I would market it, et cetera… But I’ve really enjoyed the work I’ve done for several clients this summer. I find that it doesn’t suck me dry when I’m working. So keep an eye out, and in the meantime, tell me what you think of Dad’s site.
Found something really weird today… a 10-foot tall calculator…. made entirely out of K’NEX.
No digital display. No abacus. Just K’NEX:
The thing works by dropping nine balls into the top of the unit. Four balls for the first number (that’s binary allowing up to the number 15), one ball for the operation (add or subtract) and four balls for the last number. The balls then drop through a series of tracks and logical gates to calculate a final answer.
The most interesting part is how they duplicate the logical gates by controlling how the balls flow. A normal logical gate, say an AND gate, only will produce output when both inputs are true. So they figured out a way to make a physical AND gate drop the ball only when two balls are input to the gate. This is how they got a completely mechanical, non-electrical unit to do such calculations. Yes, this is how we did it ages ago, and really how we learned to do what we know as computing today.
But for a hopeless geek like me, this is crazy cool.