Tao of Mac

Nov 21st 2004 · 2 min read

A Leisurely Stroll Through the News

Finally got some couch time with my iBook, after a good time yesterday at a friend's watching umpteen photos of China and a trip to the . The weather outside is uncharacteristically cloudy and cold - kinda reminds me of London.

  • Oooo, biased reporting. I wonder if I'll be accused of being "an anti- zealot" by linking to this (henceforth confirming said bias and adding an extra dollop of cluelessness). Weird to see this sort of thing in a news site - personal blogs can express opinions (and petty hatreds), although it does them credit to do so politely, but news sites? Someone get a clue stick, please.
  • Still on the biased reporting topic, here's another meaningless IDC Study (warning, raise forward banner ad deflector shields). This is going to get misquoted repeatedly over the next few weeks, so here's a summary: revenue from sales of servers and services is going down (oh, and IDC considers as a different thing). What this hints at is a shift to lower-cost options and a raise in Windows licensing/operation costs (that can be either volume or TCO, depending on your bias), but "big-iron" is still there - the other stuff is growing around it.
  • Another tiny snippet of -related news that slipped by: WebDAV access to Hotmail via Entourage, and Express is now for paying customers only - this also affects users, which is why I use my account with it now.
  • 2.4 is just around the corner, with a number of changes. I have only two gripes with it: It could be better documented, and syntax has changed too often for my liking. I'm glad this time around it's going to be mostly about bug fixes and enhancements, and I hope it's released in time to be rolled into , just like 2.3.
  • Photos of the London Apple Store, another place I intend to visit the next time I'm there.
  • The GIMP (that strange application heralded as an image editor by all those hairy Open Source geeks who never used ) is also moving towards a new release. Some people hate it. Others swear by it. I refuse to use it for anything serious until it gets a real UI (and a couple of clues as to the true meaning of the word "usability") no matter what anyone else says. And I'm not a nut, either (although I used it on a daily basis from 2.0 or so onwards) - I use these days, which at least has a decent UI.
  • Despite all the hype and photos, I still can't get excited over the Treo. It's just... not all there, somehow.
  • I had no idea Todd Dominey played Unreal. I'll try to check out Damnation the next time I feel the urge to frag something (it's been a while now, and the current batch of Halo 2 commercials does little to bring out the gamer in me).
  • It's a bit weird stumbling into one of these in a shop. After all, getting 1TB of storage off the shelf is not something you envisioned five years ago (just like 1GB was a weird notion ten years ago, etc., etc.). For the record, it's priced at Eur. 1182 here (a bit too pricey for me, especially considering I still haven't been able to fill the 250GB Maxtors I use for laptop snapshots).