Technology

Air Pogue

This entry was posted in Apple Computer Technology on by

David Pogue has an interesting review of the MacBook Air in which he says:

Otherwise, though, I’ve lived and flown with this machine for a month, presented nine talks on it, and have not missed its missing features one iota. It’s plenty fast and capacious as a second machine.
Meanwhile, when your laptop has the thickness and feel of a legal pad and starts up with the speed of a PalmPilot, it ceases to be a traditional laptop. It becomes something you whip open and shut for quick lookups, something you check while you’re standing in line or at the airline counter, something you can use in places where hauling open a regular laptop (and waiting for it) would just be too much hassle.

What he does not say is that while regular MacBooks and MacBook Pros may be bulkier they also “start up with the speed of a PalmPilot”. I regularly pull out my 15″ MacBook Pro for these quick lookups, etc.

The Future is Fast….

This entry was posted in Internet Technology on by

Greg Reinacker notes:

…and the future is really blazin’ fast connections.
We used to have 4 T1’s ganged together somehow in our office, giving us around 6 Mb/sec. Shared by 75 people, and responsible for not only internet but also telephone traffic, you can imagine it wasn’t exactly fast.
At home I have a Comcast cable modem, and I get something like 8 Mb/sec, which until today I thought was pretty fast.
But this morning, when I got to the office, our IT folks had completed our office network cutover to a 100 Mb/sec fiber connection to the internet…and oh. my. gosh.

He is right. Once you’ve seen really high speed access, real broadband, those reasonably useful cable connections are clearly not that fast.
The baseline that we should be looking at for home connections is the 100 Mbps Greg now has in his office. You are not going to use it at that rate continuously anytime soon but it will help bring the Internet much closer to a real time interactive multimedia environment.
Bandwidth intensive businesses as well as many academic and research institutions now have 1 or more 10 Gigabit/sec connections.

If your workstation is optimized to take advantage of these high speed connections, and most are not, you will get some truly blazing download speeds.

A Long Dead Magazine Resurrected

This entry was posted in Journalism Technology on by

The Industry Standard used to be a regular read back in the day when I subscribed to lots of dead-tree media. I welcome them back:

An icon of the dot-com era is making a comeback of sorts. The Industry Standard launched Monday in a new online-only format, with news and analysis on the Internet economy and a social networking twist.

Unfortunately, they must still be well embedded in the dot-com era as I haven’t been able to find any RSS feeds.

Perhaps they think we still use bookmarks as a way to navigate back to a site daily…

Update (2/7): The feeds are there at the bottom of the right sidebar. I’d swear I looked there and didn’t see them. Thanks for the pointer Alison.