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Category: Geek service

  • Dell XPS M1730

    dell xps m1730

    Dell just officially released it’s monster gaming rig, the XPS M1730. This thing is insane. For $2999 (and up) you get:

    • Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) T7700 (2.4 GHz)
    • 17 inch LCD WUXGA (1920 x 1200)
    • dual 512MB Nvidia GeForce 8700 graphics cards (running in SLI mode)
    • 2.0 megapixel webcam, noise-cancelling earbuds (for the online gaming set)
    • a dedicated “AGEIA PhysX” processor for advanced physics rendering
    • secondary LCD display, funky space age exterior, running lights

    not to mention all sorts of options like twin hard drives in a RAID array and a Blu Ray DVD burner. Notebook Review.com has a preliminary review that has no real surprises; the M1730 is basically an all-in-one desktop replacement and gaming rig, and is not really designed for lugging around campus or on your business flight.

    I’ve been flogging the idea that desktop PCs, as a form factor, are obsolete. The trend is towards monster rigs like the M1730, or smaller machines that plug into a desktop environment loaded with external devices. I tend to favor the latter, but that imposes a fundamental performance hit (though external graphics cards can help ameliorate this). Even a beast like the M1730 is still going to be second fiddle to a true desktop gaming rig, but still has enough horsepower to satisfy the average gamer.

  • skynet ascendant: Xohm

    xohmIn three years, internet access is going to be so pervasive that our modern expectation of finding a wifi hotspot here and there will seem quaint. Sprint’s new WiMax service (dubbed Xohm) promises cable/dsl-level access speeds anywhere, and it will be rolled out in three test markets in spring 2008. Ars Technica went for a cruise on the Chicago River with Sprint and Motorola to test drive it, and were wowed:

    The results were impressive. The first time we ran the test, we got 2425Kbps down and 1474Kbps up with a 99ms ping, with the S.S. Summer of George cruising down the river 30 feet below street level. We hit Speedtest again after the boat tied up, and the results were even better: 3229Kbps down and 1500Kbps up with a 70ms ping.

    Both the performance and experience were far superior to Verizon’s EV-DO service. The absolute best I was able to squeeze out of EV-DO was 1253Kbps/674Kbps with a 179ms latency—and that was a best-case scenario. Speeds were more typically in the 500-700Kbps range.

    Speed aside, the browsing experience was much different than any other mobile broadband I’ve used. Unlike other wireless services, which feel “laggy” and offer a markedly different experience than a wired connection, the WiMAX demo was more akin to DSL and cable. Latency was good, and, as the Speedtest.net number indicated, speeds were comparable to a decent DSL connection.

    What is even more exciting about this is that Xohm will be priced to compete against cable and dsl, and will also be more open about service contracts etc than traditional cell phone-based access plans:

    Unlike 3G wireless services, which are targeted at mobile users needing a quick broadband fix, Sprint plans to take on the DSL/cable duopoly with Xohm. Sprint spokesperson John Polivka told me that pricing would be competitive with DSL and cable, although the exact numbers have not yet been determined.

    There’s also a strong open access component to Xohm. Although consumers will be getting the service from Sprint or Clearwire, they’ll be able to use the hardware and applications of their choice on the network. Polivka said that there wouldn’t be fixed-length, cellular-style contracts either. Instead, consumers will be able to subscribe to the service for as long as they want, using hardware that they purchase themselves.

    However, thats just scratching the surface. The first products using WiMax will mostly be laptop cards, but the technology is being designed with the embedded market in mind. That means cell phones, music players, digital cameras, printers… pretty much any consumer device could in principle have perpetual access to the Net. How this will transform user interfaces and usage is anybody’s guess; it’s a truly transformative technology.

  • combo speakers/USB hub

    now this is a great product idea – a combination speaker system and USB hub for use with notebook computers in a desk environment:

    notebook speakers usb hub

    Its worth noting that notebook PCs have been outselling desktops since 2005. Increasingly, the primary computing environment is on a laptop. Expect to see more and more products – like the external graphics card – that bow to this realization.

  • brilliant

    Ringo talks to The Steve about The Beatles on iTunes. True story, FSJ assures us:

    He goes, “Oh there’s always something next, innit? We had the vinyl records, and then the cassettes and the eight tracks, and the CDs, and now there’s your iTunes, but really I think we’ve missed that one. We’ve just waited too long. So we might as well just try to jump forward and get on that other thing.” I’m like, What other thing? He goes, “Whatever it is that’s coming next. I don’t know. You should talk to Paul. I think he knows. By the way, I keep getting this error message on my computer. Do you know what that means? How do I fix that?”

    This guy is a master. He’s right up there with Vader’s blog.

  • Darren Rowse

    I took a online quiz to see which web celebrity I am most similar, and the answer turned out to be Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger fame:

    You are like Darren Rowse. You are relatively mild mannered, confident in how you operate and choose not to “rock the boat”. Your ego does not flair often. Instead, you choose to assist other bloggers as much as possible. In some cases, you may find it to be your mission in life. You do not participate in a large amount of social networking and if you do, you’re not particularly aggressive about “friending” people. To you, it is a waste of time that could be used for more productive things.

    Intrigued, I went to Rowse’s site and it is definitely a resource worth keeping an eye on. I’ve added it to my feeds.

  • Big Brother Steve

    too good to pass up.

    1984 Apple ad

    September 5 Apple ipod announcement

    Fifty years from now people will look back and mark this date as the turning point when the shackles of 20th-century media and telephony and film and TV and print were thrown off, shrugged away like so much heavy useless armor. And you, Apple faithful, will tell your grandchildren that you were there to see it. You lined up at the Apple store on Day One, your hands trembling, and purchased this magnificent device and recognized, even then, that what you were touching was the future. You will tell how you were there on the day when freedom — yes! glorious freedom! — burst into the world like sunlight into a darkened cave. Freedom. Say it out loud. Freedom. What a word. What a concept. A new kind of freedom, the kind where you lock yourself into the world of an enlightened despot, the greatest figure of our age, the Walt Disney of the 21st century, and bask in the glory of what I give you. My freedom. My world. My greatness. Multitouch coupled to disk drive coupled to WiFi coupled to Safari coupled to OS X. Imagine it! Dream it! Then dare to do it!

    Photos and text via Fake Steve, who just earned a slot in my RSS portfolio.

  • O Apple, why hast thou forsaken us?

    I don’t think Apple is doooomed (h/t to Brian for the meme) but it’s clear that Apple is losing some of its focus on what its users want in its drive to become a media company rather than a computer company. There’s a lengthy article over at Tech Digest that looks at the current Mac lineup (Mini, iMac, and Pro) and comes away unhappy with the lack of a suitable midrange option. And even the top-end Pro has woefully underpowered graphics in comparison to the rest of the field.

    Of course, on the media company front, things aren’t all that rosy from userland either. With the introduction of the anticipated touchscreen Video iPod, Apple has cut the price on the high-end iPhone by a third – $200 (!). Woe unto the early adopters who were tempted by the Apple and adopted early. This is the sort of arseholeish behavior by Apple that makes me, someone who was waiting for exactly the phone-less iPhone device that the touchscreen iPod represents, extremely unlikely to go out on a limb and invest in one.

    More and more, it seems like Apple is crafting a “experience” for its users, informing them of what they need and substituting style for substance. And treating it’s users like chumps in the process, under the (probably accurate) assumption that they will come crawling back for more. It’s ironic that Apple’s slogan used to be, “Think Different”. More and more, making the sizable investment in Apple’s hardware means quite the opposite. It isn’t quite Camazotz yet, but then again, everyone on the street does seem to be wearing white earbuds nowadays…

    UPDATE: Fake Steve Jobs weighs in. Also, he’s got an extra-special offer for the early adopters of yesteryear.

    UPDATE 2: don’t miss this column by Cringely. Excerpt:

    Steve does things like this because he can. It reaffirms his iron grip over both Apple and Apple’s customers. It’s a lot about ego and a little about business, though with Steve Jobs they are hard to differentiate.

    Here is something very important to remember about Steve Jobs (and probably the only part of this column that will bother him in the least): most of his business moves are still in reaction to having been fired by Apple back in 1985.

    It’s a fascinating deconstruction of the whole pricing fiasco and the consequences. Bottom line: Apple milks $75 million extra profit out of its hard-core fanbase. What else are they good for, after all? Read the whole thing.

  • Google reader adds RSS search; but I want more

    Finally!

    search is finally in Google Reader. Now you can find that that apricot recipe you came across a few months ago and now have a craving for. Or perhaps you’d like to search for “ipod” so that you can read at once all the posts in your subscriptions that mention today’s announcements.

    Search lets you use keywords to find items in your subscriptions (if you’re looking to search all blogs, give Blog Search a try). If you subscribe to someone’s shared items, it’ll search those too.

    OK, I’ve only been using Google Reader for two weeks, but the very first thing I noticed was the lack of a search function. It seems obvious that a Google service would have some sort of search capability, but it just wasn’t there. It’s a welcome feature addition, though now I’d like to see Reader add a storage quota and save headlines indefinitely like Gmail does (and allow users to pay for upgraded storage as they already do for Gmail and Picasa). Ultimately Reader should be integrated directly into Gmail with a unified interface.

    What would be tremendously useful would be to make a given search public, and publish a RSS feed of its own. This could then be subscribed to like any other feed or fed in Yahoo Pipes, Twitter, or other APIs.

    And while I’m wishing for ponies, can we also have a direct “Blog this” button for each headline, right next to “email this”, which integrates directly into Blogger and copies the tags over to the Labels?

  • wax

    I did a two-year stint at Lincoln Lab after college, and that was probably where I really learned how to code and surf *nix. One command I learned back then, that lives on to this day in every .alias file I ever keep handy in ~, was:

    alias wax "rm -fR"

    For those of you who know *nix, you will immediately recognize this as a Very Dangerous Tool. I have learned to wield wax very, very carefully – through (painful) experience.

    I relate this anecdote to explain why the following sort of thing gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies:

    Free, open source application Remove Empty Directories (RED) searches your computer for empty folders and deletes the ones you don’t want around anymore. Just point RED at the drive or directory you want to scan and it lists every empty folder in that directory. You can then either delete every empty folder or selectively protect the empty folders you don’t want to lose.

    Sure, sure, it lists every folder first – but this is the kind of thing you never want to entrust to a script. File this under “hell no”-ware.

  • ∫ (dCabin/Cabin) = ?

    I love this joke. No fair googling the answer; leave your best guess in the comments.

    For the record, I was telling this joke as far back as 1991.