I have Leopard. Have had for a few days now. But I also have a colossal deadline hanging over me, in the form of Time‘s Best Inventions issue. So I’ll plan on running another in my “The Last Review” series next week. Meantime I’ll perform the most important service a blogger can serve: linking to the roundups of the reviews. Apple 2.0 …
Gadgets
Is Steve Jobs Going Soft?
I couldn’t quite muster the energy to be upset, or even surprised, when Apple released a software update earlier this fall that crushed iPhones which users had modified in unauthorized ways. I mean, I feel bad for anybody whose phone got bricked, but honestly: what did they think was going to happen? Apple is very very cautious about …
Can Anybody Take Down Microsoft Office? Probably, Yeah
I spent my high school years composing bad short stories in PFS Write. The first two years of college were lost to a monstrous Smith Corona typewriter/word processor hybrid. I finally got a Mac Classic in my junior year, and since then I have never been tempted to stray from the happy prison of Microsoft Word. I think of it as one of the …
The iPod Touch: Now Entirely Phone-Free!
It’s a timeless arc. We’ve seen it play out 100 times. (Is that about right? 100? How many keynotes has Jobs given?) Some solid incremental updates — stubby new Nanos, with hard drives, new colors, video…ooo, ringtones, that’s a no-brainer…
And then, yeah. OK. Now that is pretty cool. The big reveal at the Apple press event today …
iPhone: The First 60 Hours
Going on three days with the iPhone now. I have actually been stopped on the street and accosted in a bar by curious Apple fanboys, so I feel like I’ve earned my wings as an iPhone user. (Not an iPhone owner, by the way: this is a loaner unit from Apple.) Some further notes:
– I’m a whiz on the Blackberry, but I am still an extremely …
Bill Gates, the Early Years: Damn, This Thing Works!
I’m going to post a lengthy excerpt here from the conversation I had with Bill Gates earlier this week, because, well, I have so much of it, and it kind of works as this wonderfully absorbing dramatic monologue about where Microsoft came from. This is him essentially telling the story of how he and Paul Allen figured out that writing …
What Was Your First Computer?
A lovely book landed on my desk today: Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers by John Alderman, Dag Spicer, and Mark Richards. It starts with a reconstructed version of the Z3 Adder, a WWII-era machine that used “hole-punched movie film” to store data, and goes up through Google’s first production server, which is not very …
Bad Tech Blogger No Donut
This rant at Gizmodo is right about gadget-bloggers, and technology journalism in general. It’s also pretty amusing.
Hot Hot Hot Virus-on-Virus Action
I find computer viruses endlessly fascinating. This is partly because as a smug, self-satisfied Mac user, I don’t see them very often. It’s also because my first cover story at Time was about the Love Bug, the 2000 megavirus that at the time seemed like the harbinger of the coming cyberapocalypse. (I still don’t see why, given the …
New Tolkien: More Morgoth
On April 17 Houghton Mifflin will publish The Children of Húrin, a “new” work of fiction by J.R.R. Tolkien:
Apparently this is a narrative he noodled with extensively during his lifetime but never completed to his own satisfaction, though he left behind a lot of manuscript pages; I think some version of it also appears in The …
Quantum Computers: Unimaginably Powerful, Also Kinda Hot
My knowledge of physics and engineering is shaky enough that sometimes I forget that stuff like neutron stars and superconductors is actually real and not made-up. (If Slaver stasis fields are real and not made-up, somebody needs to tell me.) Scheduled to cross the fiction/non-fiction barrier shortly is a commercially available quantum …
Another Party I Wasn’t Invited To
People who work at Bungie are happier than you. Somehow it seems wrong that 4×4 Halo 3 matches are being played somewhere in the world, and I am not at that place. All I can do is press my nose against those smeared-out .jpegs and whine like a whipped puppy.
But remember, happy Bungie people: it’s all fun and games till somebody …
