Tao of Mac

Mar 30th 2005 · 2 min read

Catching Up

Yeah, I know, I'm on vacation, I shouldn't be news-trawling. But it is a quiet day, and a short dip on my RSS stream (or should I say flood?) got my brain working again.

  • Yeah, the has a browser. You can even get your news fix using it, Wi-Fi operators are cutting deals to have it work on their hotspots (I wonder exactly how they will login, since the thing doesn't seem to support SSL) and Russell has waxed lyrical on its media possibilities (like Karlus and a few others, I'm beginning to wonder if Russell isn't being "assimilated" as a new form of corporate publicity, but that's another story). But is it meant to be a general-purpose media tablet? No way. And it's not going to be relevant in the mobile space, either. But it will provide Sony with a very nice cash cow in an age where people don't want to be tethered to a TV, and last for years to come as a very good personal gaming platform. Just turn off the hype already, guys.
  • Well, I guess we won't be seeing Doom III on mobile phones just yet, but as usual, Carmack addresses a lot of thorny development issues every MIDP developer can empathize with. He also explains why peer-to-peer mobile gaming would probably work better over circuit-switched data, which will likely raise some eyebrows in the mobile industry (yeah, it's true, folks - packets don't fix everything). But my favorite quote is an eerie echo of my own feelings towards mobile : "Write-once-run-anywhere. Ha. Hahahahaha."
  • The Feature is getting to be a pretty impressive unbiased opinion source (which is both rare and short-lived where it regards Internet news). Their pieces on Fixed Mobile Broadband and Content Blindness are refreshing, although their harping on walled gardens is getting a little old. Still, it was nice to finally see someone else pointing out the fallacy of Muni Wireless (which I previously ).
  • DOSBox got a nicely packaged Mac front-end, which may be useful for some people running last century software (I don't have any of my old DOS games around, so I can't say if it's any good).
  • As April 1st approaches, more and more Palm rumors surface. If I were Palm, I'd announce one of them on Friday, leave the Internet hype machine running throughout the weekend and say "ha! April Fools!" on Monday - I think it would be much more fun and effective than, say, suing rumor sites or something.
  • Speaking of April Fools', last year we got Gmail (which was sort of a meta-April Fools'). I wonder what we'll have floating around this year, although nothing will ever quite beat the time when Netcraft was reporting Yahoo's servers as running . Now that was fun.