Saturday, June 12, 2004
Top Stories
Apple, Microsoft Poised For Streaming Media Battle
What may make the difference is the level to which each company supports industry standards, an area where Apple has taken the lead so far.
News
Mozilla Firefox Takes Last Step To Full Release
The open-source project is set to make available Firefox 0.9, the browser's last technology preview release focusing on new features.
Apple Readies Next-Gen MPEG-4 Part 10
Apple is currently testing new video compression software that will eventually improve its QuickTime Player.
Apple Talks AirPort Express For Mac And Windows
"I think it's quite intuitive that you can plug it into the wall next to your computer or your stereo; I think its quite intuitive that it is so somall, smaller than a computer's power brick, so now you can wirelessly roam your hotel room."
Apple Gets Kudos From NAB Participants
Apple was given three honors in the Top Ten Products at NAB '04 category.
Laptop Expansion Hinges On Superintendents' Level Of Interest
Apple is seeking to determine the minimum level of participation needed to make it possible to rent laptops to school districts seeking to expand the program into high schools.
Opinion
So Witty
There are factors other than market share that have led to the remarkable paucity of security exploits on Mac OS X.
Review
Call Of Duty
Call of Duty is a must have for any first person shooter fan.
Sidetrack
As presented by Dan Gillmor, here's a short animation showing "the relative numbers of queries to the Google site in various parts of the world".
Very cool.
The Apple's Dock is not Windows' taskbar.
We are coming up to version 4 of Mac OS X soon, and yet, very little applications take advantage of the dock.
Application icons should reflect useful information in the dock. For example, an FTP application should show the status of the connection. Speaking as someone who always forget to close FTP connections, I will appreciate having easily informed on whether the connection is still opened, and whether there are still uploading or downloading activities going on.
Document icons should help the users to differentiate between different documents — don't just stick a generic icon in there, and expect the user to scrub through the list to find the document he want.
My first computer game that I've downloaded, if I remember correctly, was Commander Keen. There I were, a young teenager, learning all about the world of BBS, downloads, and hours of waiting for the download, as the binary trickles down the modem.
Why the nostalgia all of the sudden? Well, here I am again, leaving my computer on for hours as the demo of "Call of Duty" (a whopping 256MB) trickles down my cable modem and AirPort. :-)
Wintel
Where, Oh Where Is Windows XP SP2?
There's still no Release Candidate 2 beta out. But there is a growing body of information on anticipated application-compatibility problems.
Internet Explorer Holes Causing Alarm
Four new holes have been discovered in the Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that could allow mallicious hackers to run attack code on Windows systems, even if thoese systems have installed the latest software patches.
Microsoft File Patent Faces Exam
A U.S. government agency agreed this week to re-examine a controversial Microsoft patent on the Windows FAT file format, following an objection from a public-interest group.