Axodys

While all the newly announced Macs are pretty sweet, this product is most likely going to be my next computer purchase. Well, that and a bigger hard drive.

Based on the starting price of $1800 for the new Apple G4 Cube I’m somewhat doubtful that it will be a hit on the order of the iMac. Sure it looks great, but if I was getting a G4 of some kind I’d just as soon spend the extra money and get the dual model now that they’re available. Various benchmarks for general application use up to this point have found G3’s to be very comparable and sometimes faster than the G4 unless you’re performing tasks in applications that specifically takes advantage of AltiVec (shoot, I’ve already forgotten the stupid marketing name Apple coined) like Photoshop or SoundJam. That should change to some extant with MacOS X and its more general support for the Velocity Engine commands (stupid, stupid name- guess my memory isn’t that bad after all), but two G4’s are always going to be better than one, especially under OS X with its built in multiprocessor support.

Holy Cow! I guess it is real!

Is it real or just another groundless Mac rumor? Looks like we should know by the time I get up tomorrow.

I have a feeling that the MacOS X beta isn’t going to be ready for action until later this summer. That’s fine with me as I think Apple should try to get it done right, but the sooner it comes the better. Mostly I’m just hopeful that Steve Jobs will have MacOS X demos tomorrow that show some definite improvement since DP 4.

Hot days in Spokane. Today it got up into the mid eighties and the forecast indicates more of the same through the weekend. I think my current apartment is a bit cooler than my old one, but it’s still plenty warm. Thank goodness I bought that double window fan last summer.

The REALbasic Bible is an interesting looking open source writing project aimed at creating a freely available reference/tutorial for REALbasic.

David Brown of Zopefish fame had some interesting Home Portal thoughts the other day. I’ve had similar thoughts myself. Considering I’ve had a small network of two or three computers here in my apartment for the last couple years and can reasonably expect to have networkable machines by the time I own my own house it only makes sense to maximize their utility in such a fashion. Just combine your networked computers with a central home server and free nifty backend tools like Zope or PHP, add a database like mySQL, and throw in some development work, and you have a local web based household information and control system. I could definitely see myself working on something like that down the road.

I haven’t collected comic books for quite some time, but one of my favorite monthly purchases back during that time was The X-Men. So of course I had to go to yesterday’s opening of the new movie. And I was in no way disappointed. The characters were true to the comic (Hugh Jackman *IS* Wolverine!), the casting was great, and the stage is set for even better sequels down the road.

A while back I discovered that there isn’t much in the way of inexpensive IDE cards for older PCI Macs. Well, the good news is that Sonnet Technologies is coming out with a $99 model. I may have to pick one of these up down the road.