Well, in a stunning display of lack-of-willpower, I just ordered a brand new MacBook Pro* from the Apple Store. I got the 1.67gHz model, and I'll upgrade the RAM on my own. I'm stoked. I've been using my Powerbook a lot more than I ever thought I would, and the thought of getting a 4x speed increase is too incredible to pass up.
And the iSight in the bezel — how cool is that? I just got my Mom a regular iSight, so we're all about the video chats now. And this will make it even easier.
Seriously, this is the best "one-more-thing" that Steve has had in a long time. Everyone was predicting new iBooks instead, so this rocks.
As some of you may remember, I just bought a new PowerBook in September, so I'll be looking to sell that as soon as the new one arrives (supposed to be shipping in February). My old Powerbook is a 15" a with 1.67gHz G4 processor and 2gb of RAM. It's actually a really nice machine, and feels reasonably fast. I've been able to do a little java development with IDEA and some Photoshop work on it without too much discomfort. It's still under Applecare, too. If anyone is interested, let me know.
* In this whole announcement, I think that the name-change was the only bad news. PowerBook is a great name with a long history and it just sounds cool. MacBook Pro sounds really clunky. I think people will be calling them PowerBooks for a long time to come.
Take a look at this description of how Google gets translated from Xooglers, and tell me that doesn't sound like a wiki.
Here's the page about the program
How come I never heard about this? It's a excellent example of the Internet's most powerful company achieving real value (safely) by using unstructured community input. Or am I reaching too far in claiming this as a wiki proof-case?
Finally, something to get me excited about TiVo again. They've announced the TiVo Series 3!
There are several new features that I've wanted for a long time:
- HDTV!
- 2 Tuners (technically six: three pairs of over-the-air, digital NTSC and ATSC). But importantly, you can record two shows at once from any source.
- Ethernet (but still no built-in wireless?!)
- HDMI and component outputs
- Up to 1080i output
- 16:9 / 4:3 aspect switching on the remote (this has been a killer ever since I got my new TV.)
- The remote is backlit
- External Serial ATA interface for attaching an external drive: you no longer have to crack the case to expand capacity.
- A screen on the front of the unit that tells you what it's recording.
- CableCard 2.0 (It remains to be seen whether this is at all useful to me.)
All of this stuff sounds great. First of all, it's necessary to keep pace with the home PC-based solutions that have developed since TiVo's introduction. And the addition of HDTV is a feature that has been sorely lacking for tool long. Also, hopefully will give TiVo a big cash infusion when many of their customers upgrade their hardware. I know I will.
One thing the ars review doesn't mention at all is the software. I'm hoping that there is a big improvement there: I'm particularly hoping to see a faster interface and more options for interacting with the TiVo from my computer. (Not so much watching the shows, but controlling the unit.) Even though I tend to be sitting just a few feet from the unit, I've really come to like the way the Squeezebox can be controlled from any web browser.
The bad news is that the Series3 is scheduled for mid- to late-2006, and that's a long time from now. But this announcement does give me some hope that they're actually doing something useful up there at TiVo HQ.
Well, I really meant to get this post up before the turning of the new year, but I never managed it. But despite the fact that you've missed your chance to deduct from your 2005 taxes, there are still many worthwhile organizations who need your help.
Of particular interest to readers of this blog, Wikipedia and the Creative Commons are both in need of funds. Read Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' message and CC founder Lawrence Lessig's appeal.
Donate to Wikipedia
Donate to Creative Commons.
And of particular interest to anyone who spends any time online at all, the Electronic Freedom Foundation is always a worthy cause.
Join the EFF.
Thanks for listening.
UPDATE: CC made it's year-end goal, with help from Flickr, SixApart, RedHat and Microsoft(?!).
Happy New Year, everybody! Just a quick note that I'm back in Santa Barbara after several hectic weeks of travel, and that I hope to have something more interesting to say in the very near future.
This has already been linked six ways from Sunday, but Nature magazine published an article in which they probed 42 articles from both Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica for correctness. The results? They came out roughly even: Wikipedia contained four errors per article compared to Britannica's three.
It's also worth noting (thanks Slashdot) that "Wikipedia articles in the sample were, on average, 2.6 times longer than Britannica's — meaning Wikipedia has an error rate far less than Britannica's."
I've always found it ridiculous to assume that a traditional encyclopedia would be more accurate and less biased than Wikipedia. After all, the Encyclopedia Britannica is still written by human authors. It is written by fewer of them, in fact, so in theory there should be a greater chance for errors and bias to creep in. But, I'm very used to the whole "many eyes make all bugs shallow" doctrine. For everyone outside of the OSS world, it's still a novel concept.
I really think this is the argument that needs to be pressed: just because Britannica claims to be "authoritative," it does not follow that it their articles are more accurate. And if you understand that there you risk inaccuracy whether you go to the Cathedral or the Bazaar, then the secondary benefits of Wikipedia — timeliness, depth of information, breadth of subject, continuous evolution, availability and price — become more convincing.
I suppose one could argue (as the E.B. did) that Wikipedia is subject to vandalism in a way that a traditional encyclopedia is not. And while it clearly can happen, it doesn't seem to be a frequent problem. But I'll admit that I don't have any data to back that up.
Wikipedia has decided to restrict anonymous users from creating new articles.
In actually, I don't think this will have a deleterious effect on the quality of quantity of Wikipedia's content. However, in principle, Wikipedia is saying that a) people can't be trusted, and b) the community is not powerful enough to correct itself. It's a disheartening admission.
UPDATE: According to the comments, Wikipedia's move is much more modest than the CNet article reports. They are not doing away with the ability to work anonymously. Instead, they are forcing users to create a username before creating pages. But crucially, a username doesn't require any identifying information. So people can be just as anonymous as they have always been — there is just a slightly higher barrier to entry, and hopefully a higher barrier to vandalism.
Well, you'll be happy to know that last night I competed in my first trivia night in over a year. You may recall that my old roommates and I attended a weekly pub quiz in Santa Barbara. We had a regular team, and we did pretty well. But about a year and a half ago, the we began running the show when the former hostess moved away. So I've ben making up questions rather than answering them for a while.
But last night I found myself in San Francisco attending a pub quiz at the Pig and Whistle with some of my old teammates who have moved to the city. It was just like riding a bike. We cleaned up, answering 47 out of 54 questions, and winning the grand prize for the night — which involved the six of us beating out a team of fourteen.
Yeah, that felt good.
The brand new WikiMatrix site is a much handier way of doing side-by-side comparisons of different wiki-engines. It has a discussion forum as well, but having just launched there's not much content yet. Nonetheless, a useful tool for anyone interested in the wiki market.
UPDATE: Apparently WikiMatrix is run by the guy behind DokuWiki., as explained here.
Two new wiki stories over the Thanksgiving weekend: First, a new service called ProductWiki has launched. It's a GPL'd product information and review wiki. I haven't been able to dig up much background information, but the two of the three founders are graduates of the University of Waterloo. (The third may be as well; his bio doesn't state.)
Unfortunately for them, in the very same weekend, Amazon has started to beta test a new feature called "ProductWiki." I still haven't been able to see it — I assume they're just randomly selecting some small percentage of visitors to test this with. But there is more information and a screenshot at the Church of the Customer.
A few notes of interest about Amazon's feature:
- Amazon is using some rudimentary wysiwyg editor rather than wiki markup.
- Amazon doesn't allow outside linking. I realize that this is easier for them, but I think it's a big loss for the user.
- Amazon wants to keep the subjective review content separate from the ProductWiki. But I wonder how they're going to manage to do that.
Jonathan Nolen 