Last week my picks were poor and the only one I got right was the one I was hoping would be wrong.
NY Jets vs. Pittsburgh St. Louis vs. Atlanta Minnesota vs. Philadelphia Indianapolis vs. New England 8-8 teams should not make it beyond the second week.
It’s but a few days since Apple released the Mac mini and we already have a product from another cool company with a similar (ok, exactly the same) name. Google has released the Google Mini.
Before you plunk down $4,995 to get one of these neat blue boxes, you have to know that this isn’t a consumer device. Rather, it’s a server to index a business’s documents and facilitate searches of those documents.
Michael wrote to me:
Any idea how OSX runs on the 256 MB of ram model? I’ve heard arguments go both ways. What about Panther?
Michael is of course asking about the new Mac mini. He’s considering one as he describes in his blog entry:
I’m seriously considering purchasing the new Mac-Mini. Ultimately I am in Apple’s target demographic of devout PC users who are considering in dabbling in Macs but are standoffish about the price of Macs.
I’m going to review the new Apple product announcements inwhat I consider increasing importance.
iLife ‘05 # To me, this is pretty incremental. I don’t use anything in iLife (sans the free iTunes and iPhoto). Garageband fans will be overjoyed with a full 8 tracks to manipulate. At $79, I’m not sure I’ll be getting it though. I don’t need the new version of iPhoto that badly.
New from the expo:
The Mac mini The iPod shuffle iWork iLife ‘05 The other announcements aren’t terribly exciting and the lack of a Tiger release date was disappointing. More tonight.
The Macworld Expo San Francisco keynote is less than 4 hours away. The whole Mac community is waiting with baited breath. Personally, I want to find out more about Tiger. In particular, a release date more specific than “first half of 2005” and hopefully sooner rather than later.
We also get to find out which rumors were worth something. The current most popular rumors are:
iWork Apple’s new office suite flash-based iPod headless iMac the $500 Mac Mac OS X Tiger info and release date Powerbook updates with slightly faster processors I still don’t get the head-popping excitement being generated by the flash-based iPod. Shortly after the keynote is done, I’ll do a quick summary. Later tonight, I’ll do my little rant on what all the news will mean for the future.
I swear I’m not getting paid for this. At any rate, Netflix just added two very cool features to their service.
Profiling # The first is profiles. This is going to catch like wildfire. I’d wager a guess that most Netflix subscriptions are shared by multiple people. Just think about families, roommates, and couples. The original implementation of Netflix didn’t really take this into account. Everyone had to share the same queue, same ratings, and same recommendations. Having the same queue meant constant manipulation so that everyone got their movies instead of just one person. The downfalls of the other two are self-explanatory.
This weekend, I was downloading some software that was compressed. I have those files automatically open with Stuffit Expander (as is the default on most setups). I noticed though that Stuffit Expander was bouncing over and over… and over… and over again. I assumed it had hung, force quit, and tried opening it again. Same thing occurred. I tried reinstalling Stuffit. It kept doing it. I left it going for a while and eventually it started. I thought that was mighty strange. I was starting to get worried that it was particular to my Powerbook and that I’d have to think about reinstalling the OS.
No Pats this week. Very sad.
St. Louis vs. Seattle NY Jets vs. San Diego Denver vs. Indianapolis Minnesota vs. Green Bay I picked Indy, but after the shameful way that they threw the last game of their season so they could play Denver, I hope Denver whoops them. Irony is delicious.
The infamous company MacMice has announced a new product called “The Ball”. I’ll admit, it sounds a little dirty to me (and would probably illicit a snicker or two from less mature audiences).
It follows its brother product, “The Mouse”, not in nomenclature, but in appearance. It’ll fit in with your other Mac peripherals. What makes this trackball cool though is the fact that it’s Bluetooth. In fact, it’s the first Bluetooth trackball I’ve ever seen. That alone makes it pretty cool. However, I’m not sure that it’s $90 worth of cool. I never really understood the practicality of wireless trackballs either, so this isn’t something I’m likely to get.