[MyAppleMenu] Nov 21, 2002

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Thu Nov 21 21:05:01 EST 2002 

MyAppleMenu Newsletter
Thursday, Nov 21, 2002

MyAppleMenu : Top Stories
-------------------------
Maine Laptops: IT Takes A Village (Katie Dean, Wired News)
<http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,56478,00.html>
The enormous undertaking hasn't been easy. But recent visits to a handful of Maine schools show that with the right mix of time, resources and community support, the laptop investment pays big dividends.

Wozniak To Step Onto The Mac Stage (Dawn Kawamoto, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2100-1040-966648.html?tag=fd_top>
Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak is taking the stage at Macworld Expo after a six-year absence and will be giving his first presentation there in more than a decade.

MyAppleMenu : News
------------------
Apple Joins Java Community Process (Stacy Cowley, IDG News Service)
<http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0211/21.java.php>

Comdex 2002: Where's The Party? (Ian Fried and Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2100-1040-966764.html>
With all the pessimism surrounding Comdex Fall 2002 and its future, it's refreshing to meet a guy like Microsoft's Kevin Eagan.

Apple Delays Xserve Storage Unit (Ian Fried, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2100-1001-966772.html>
The Xserve RAID, which Apple had promised to deliver by the end of this year, will not make the deadline, according to a posting on Apple's Web site.

Point And Flick (Garry Barker, The Age)
<http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/20/1037697731217.html>
We must concede that the update covers huge ground and is worth the time and trouble but not the money.

Boxing The Genome Code (Garry Barker, The Age)
<http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/20/1037697731221.html>
While a couple of million people now carry the little white box with the tuning wheel to provide music wherever they go, Dr Will Gilbert, one of the leading technologists in the genetics industry in the US, uses his iPod to carry the entire human genome wherever he goes.

LaCie Announces 200GB And 250GB FireWire Hard Drives (MacMinute)
<http://www.macminute.com/2002/11/20/lacie>

Xpowerhosting Uses Xserves Exclusively (Peter Cohen, MacCentral)
<http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0211/20.xpower.php>
Xpowerhosting.com is a new Internet hosting service provider that hopes to make a mark with Macintosh enthusiasts as one of the first Web hosting companies to use Apple's Xserve exclusively.

Weathering The 'Switch' (David Zeiler, Baltimore Sun)
<http://www.sunspot.net/technology/custom/pluggedin/bal-mac112102,0,5093617.column?coll=bal-business-indepth>
Five months after Apple began its $117 million advertising campaign, here's how some switchers view the change.

MyAppleMenu : Opinions
----------------------
Crossplatform Conundrum (Jeff Lewis, MacOPINION)
<http://www.macopinion.com/columns/macskeptic/02/11/20/index.html>
When you put all the rumors together, the conclusion seems to point to a PDA.

The Fruit Of Apple's Labour (Azeem Azhar, The Guardian)
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,843917,00.html>
Apple is far from dead or dying. The existing customer-base is loyal. And it is sending an attractive message to new ones. More importantly, it proves that Apple is still relevant. Relevance isn't something that appears on a balance sheet. But it is a lodestone that attracts developer excitement and market buzz. Relevant firms rarely die. Far from it, they flourish.

MyAppleMenu : Reviews
---------------------
Quick Review Of 1GHz PowerBook G4 (Juha Haataja, Universal Rule)
<http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/stories/2002/11/18/quickReviewOf1GhzPowerbook.html>
The PowerBook could be a replacement for a desktop machine. You should investigate the ergonomics of the system before taking the plunge and removing your desktop system. A separate display, a mouse, and an external keyboard may become essential accessories, if you are planning to replace your desktop with a portable.

iBook 12.1in Combo (Mike Hirsckorn, MacUser)
<http://www.pcpro.co.uk/front_index.php?ip=1&domain=macuser&page=%2Fnews%2Fnews_story.php%3Fid%3D35298>
We hope that the current iBooks will be the last Macs to use the aging G3 processor. However, the new iBooks are as good as ever, and at their new low prices, we can't think of a reason not to get one.

17-Inch Flat-Panel iMac: Other Than The Big Screen, Not much Is New, But That's Plenty (Owen W. Linzmayer, MacHome)
<http://www.machome.com>
The 17-inch iMac is an affordable masterpiece. If Apple were to add screen pivoting (from landscape to portrait mode), then the 17-inch flat-panel iMac would be our dream machine.

Macworld Announces Best Of Show Awards (Macworld UK)
<http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?NewsID=5588>
Macworld today announced the winners of the “Macworld Best of Show Awards”, representing the most exciting hardware and software products announced at MacExpo 2002 in London.

MyAppleMenu : Wintel News
-------------------------
Microsoft Says: Don't Trust Microsoft (Glenn Vanderburg, O'Reilly Network)
<http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2343>
It's tempting to just chortle at this, but it illustrates serious problems with the code-signing approach in general.

MS Paper Touts Unix In Hotmail's Win2k Switch (THomas C Greene, The Register)
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28226.html>
An older MS internal whitepaper from August 2000 on switching Hotmail from front-end servers running FreeBSD and back-end database servers running Solaris to a whole farm running Win2K reads like a veritable sales brochure for UNIX.

Microsoft Innovates With A Vengeance (David Kirkpatrick, Fortune)
<http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/ptech/11/20/fortune.ff.microsoft.new/>
In his keynote address to the Comdex computer trade show Monday night, Microsoft's Bill Gates demonstrated several things: that innovation really does still flourish in technology; that to call the IT industry "mature" is foolish; that, for better or worse, one company remains the undisputed flag-bearer for the entire technology industry; and that flag-bearing Microsoft still considers itself to be in the starting phases of the process of changing the world.

More Wintel News at <http://www.myapplemenu.com/wintel/>

MyAppleMenu Tomorrow : Top Stories
----------------------------------
Amazon, Google Lead New Path To Web Services (Margaret Kane, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2009-1017-966099.html>
After much hype, confusion and skepticism, a handful of Internet companies are trying to do something that has stubbornly eluded the high-tech industry: Turn the vague concept of "Web services" into a reality for the greater Internet.

Light At End Of Encryption Tunnel (Louise Knapp, Wired News)
<http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,56453,00.html>
Quantum encryption is about to make life much more difficult for Internet spies.

Wi-Fi U.S.A. (Matthew Boyle, Fortune)
<http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=210235>
High-speed wireless Internet access isn't just for the latte sippers at Starbucks anymore. Big business has discovered that it can pay off.

MyAppleMenu Tomorrow : News & Opinions
--------------------------------------
Maturity May Be Comdex' Demise (Stephen H. Wildstrom, BusinessWeek)
<http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2002/tc20021121_6382.htm>
As the computing industry has grown up, the need for a single trade show has diminished. And that's not so bad.

WiFi(ght) A Fast Connection? (John Blau, InfoWorld)
<http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/11/21/021121hnwifi.xml?s=IDGNS>
While much work has been done to improve WiFi security in recent months, the most advanced security technology in the world is worthless if users aren't forced to use it. That means IT managers -- whether they want to or not -- need to get a handle on WiFi technology and craft a strategy that prevents security breaches before they happen.

A Library For Young Browsers (Leslie Walker, Washington Post)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17546-2002Nov20.html>
The free public library opened its electronic doors on the Internet this week, offering a pilot version with nearly 200 digitized books in 18 languages for children ages 3 to 13.

As The Web Gets Easier, More Time For Fretting (Michelle Slatalla, New York Times)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/21/technology/circuits/21shop.html>
Online retailers have matured, for the most part, with many making it so seamless and easy for me to zip through the purchase process that I have once again been left with plenty of time to agonize over the quality of my choices.

Mishandled Patch Trips Security Alarms (Robert Lemos, ZDNet)
<http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-966666.html>
The questionable handling of a fix for a recent widespread software vulnerability has some administrators worried that developers can't be trusted to make security a top priority.

IBM Debuts Self-Healing Software (Reuters)
<http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-966653.html>
IBM said it will begin selling new versions of two software products based on autonomic computing, advancing the industry's goal of creating technology that can take care of itself.

Mandrake Linux ProSuite Edition 9.0 (Eugenia Loli-Queru, OSNews.com)
<http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2187>
My conclusion would be (as with Red Hat as well) to only buy the Standard Edition if you want to support Mandrake. The only "Pro" product that makes a good purchase deal from all three main Linux distros is the SuSE one.

11g - "The New Mainstream" (Eric Griffith, 802.11-Planet)
<http://www.80211-planet.com/news/article.php/1502671>
Products that support the specification based on the current draft from the IEEE, are out in force at the Comdex show in Las Vegas this week.

MyAppleMenu Reader : World
--------------------------
How War Left The Law Behind (Michael J. Glennon, New York Times)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/21/opinion/21GLEN.html>
How can the Security Council's decision bind Iraq but not the United States?

Viewer Beware (Ben Fritz, Spinsanity)
<http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20021119.html>
In "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore once again puts distortions and contradictions before the truth.

MyAppleMenu Reader : Life
-------------------------
Reflections On A Half-Century In And Around Newsroom (James B. McClatchy, Sacramento Bee)
<http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/5247215p-6253688c.html>
The commercial terms "properties" or "products" dehumanize newspapers, making them impersonal businesses without souls. The Sacramento Bee is not a property or product. It is an institution --an exceedingly fine one; a proud newspaper with a heart.

Truth Is Another Country (Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian)
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,840286,00.html>
It may seem a grave limitation for any writer to leave the facts as facts, but self-limitation is a key to art. On this frontier we should stand.

Luxury Goods Special: Confessions Of A Dustjacket Junkie (David Lovibond, The Spectator)
<http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old&section=current&issue=2002-11-09&id=2467>
The highs and lows of being addicted to collecting books.

MyAppleMenu Reader : EOF
------------------------
Lego Site Irks Maori Sympathizer (Kim Griggs, Wired News)
<http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56451,00.html>
A website for fans of Lego's Bionicle action figures has come under attack from a person angry at the use of Maori words on the website.

Salon Offers Free Access If You View Ads (Michael Liedtke, Associated Press)
<http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1764895>
Fighting for survival, the online magazine Salon.com has introduced an unusual advertising program that waives subscription fees for readers willing to wade through an interactive commercial.

MyAppleMenu SingaporeSurf : News & Opinions
-------------------------------------------
US Sticks Up For Investors In Singapore Trade Pact (Doug Palmer, Reuters)
<http://www.forbes.com/work/newswire/2002/11/20/rtr801231.html>
The United States is taking a hard line in favor of large U.S. investors as it tries to nail down the last detail of a bilateral free trade agreement with Singapore, international economists said on Wednesday.

Big Money Battles For Singapore Steel (Trish Saywell and Sara Webb, Far Eastern Economic Review)
<http://www.feer.com/articles/2002/0211_28/p012region.html>
Earlier this year, shares in NatSteel were trading at a 30% discount to its net asset value. Now the stock is soaring, and two of Asia's biggest tycoons are duelling for control of the company. With the Singapore government intricately involved, this is no simple takeover battle.

More Singapore News at <http://www.myapplemenu.com/singapore/>

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MyAppleMenu is edited by Heng-Cheong Leong. This site is not affiliated with Apple Computer, Inc., or any other companies in any manner. Apple, the Apple logo, Macintosh, Power Macintosh, PowerBook, iMac, iBook, iPod, and eMac are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. All other brands or product names are trademarks of their registered holders. Copyright &copy; 1996-2002 Heng-Cheong Leong. All rights reserved.

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