[MyAppleMenu] Feb 24, 2003

[applesurf at myapplemenu.com]

MyAppleMenu Newsletter
Monday, Feb 24, 2003

MyAppleMenu : Top Stories
-------------------------
Mac Users Must Factor Microsoft Into Future (Glenn Fleishman, Seattle Times)
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134640047_macbu240.html>
Those at Apple had to ask themselves, "Are we outsourcing our oxygen supply to a company that's in direct competition?"

Microsoft Acquires Virtual PC From Connectix (Jim Dalrymple, MacCentral)
<http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0302/19.macbu.php>
Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced that they had acquired Connectix Corp.'s Virtual PC products, including Virtual PC for Mac, Virtual PC for Windows and Virtual Server. Microsoft also hired many of the Connectix employees that worked on the products to continue development.

MyAppleMenu : News
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Apple Hopes For Quark Lift (David Frith, The Australian)
<http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,6023231%5E15397%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html>
Publishing software market leader Quark has begun to reveal glimpses of XPress 6.0 -- its first version for the Mac OS X operating system -- as it edges closer to the program's launch.

Five Questions With James Nachtwey (Joe Cellini, Apple)
<http://www.apple.com/pro/photo/nachtwey/>
"Photographs are a product of heart and mind and the ability to connect. But technology is absolutely essential as a delivery system, and in journalism the delivery is vital."

Peter Turnley: Life Studies (Joe Cellini, Apple)
<http://www.apple.com/pro/photo/pturnley/>
"I actually hired one of the most knowledgeable people in the digital photographic world, Rob Galbraith, to give me a week of intensive lessons using a digital camera and archiving my work on my PowerBook G4. It was really one of the best investments I ever made."

Apple's Graphical Crown In PC Peril (Sholto Macpherson, The Australian)
<http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,6023256%5E15397%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html>
Today there is not much difference to running imaging software on either platform.

Agilent, Apple Say Conflict With Iraq Worsening Computer Slump (Ashley Gross, Bloomberg)
<http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?ptitle=Technology%20News&s1=blk&tp=ad_topright_tech&T=markets_box.ht&s2=ad_right1_technology&bt=ad_position1_technology&box=ad_box_all&tag=technology&middle=ad_frame2_technology&s=APlnSeRaGQWdpbGVu>

REALBasic 5 For Mac Arrives (Dennis Sellers, MacCentral)
<http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0302/24.realbasic.php>
REALBasic 5 for the Mac is now available from REAL Software, with enhanced support for Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, including drawers, brushed-metal windows and toolbars.

A "Perfect Marriage" For Microsoft? (BusinessWeek)
<http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2003/tc20030221_0954_tc121.htm>
Redmond's Tim McDonough says Mac lovers have no need to fret over the giant's purchase of the cross-platform franchise from Connectix.

Connectix CEO Weighs Company's Future (Peter Galli, eWeek)
<http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,898706,00.asp>
While the company still has Macintosh products in the market today that are not based on Virtual Machines—-DoubleTalk, which allows Mac-PC networking from within the familiar Mac interface and not in a Windows environment, and the RAM Doubler, which was discontinued last month but is supported until September—-both of those products are "heading towards obsolescence" as they are not Mac OS 10 compatible.

Apple Offers Power Mac G4 Power Supply Exchange For Noise Problem (MacFixIt)
<http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20030221101406730>
Apple has begun offering a hardware solution for the Power Macintosh G4 excessive noise problem.

3 Years Ago: Mac Hits Another Home Run (BusinessWeek)
<http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_09/c3670091.htm>
Apple is poised to regain the software-design leadership it earned with the original Macintosh. It's not clear how much ground this will gain for Apple, but the renewed competition can only benefit consumers.

MyAppleMenu : Reviews
---------------------
Lights, Camera, Distraction (Neil McIntosh, The Guardian)
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,901868,00.html>
iMovie 3 appears to be filled with bugs of the worst kind. They are critical, "show-stopping" problems that manifest themselves only after the user has invested a great deal of effort in producing a long or complex movie.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon (Bill Stiteler, Applelinks.com)
<http://www.applelinks.com/reviews/ghostrecon.shtml>

The Sims: Unleashed Expansion Pack (Kirk Hiner, Apple)
<http://www.applelinks.com/reviews/sims-unleashed.shtml>

Free Video-Editing Programs Coming Into Their Own (Dwight Silverman, Houston Chronicle)
<http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/business/1790116>
[Windows Movie Maker or iMovie] may be all most users will ever need. At the very least, they are excellent starting points for anyone wanting to dive into editing home videos.

They Blog, You Blog, iBlog (Pierre Igot, Applelust.com)
<http://www.applelust.com/oped/applepeel/archives/peel_50_030221.shtml>
>From the perspective of a Mac user who’s particularly attached to user-friendliness and intuitiveness, I’d say that Radio UserLand is “almost there” and that the next generation of such tools will definitely be accessible to the ordinary Mac user with no great difficulty.

Cool! Apple's Installer Works Better With OS X 10.2.4 (Rob McNair-Huff, Mac Net Journal)
<http://www.whiterabbits.com/MacNetJournal/archives_Feb2003.html#note_727>
It looks like an undocumented feature of Mac OS X 10.2.4 is that the installer for Apple apps can now install updates in the folders where you want the applications to live, rather than the default Applications folder at the root level of your installation.

iPhoto 2: iPhoto 2 May Turn Out To Be The Most Welcome Of The iLife Upgrades (Adam Engst, Macworld)
<http://www.macworld.com/2003/04/reviews/iphoto2/>
If you're already an iPhoto user, iPhoto 2 is a shoo-in; you'll appreciate its improvements (though you'll likely be left wanting more of them). If you currently use other photo-editing and -cataloging programs, you may not find the changes reason enough to warrant changing programs.

867MHz 12-Inch PowerBook G4 (Jason Snell, Macworld)
<http://www.macworld.com/2003/04/reviews/12inchpowerbook/>
The 12-inch PowerBook G4 is not as full-featured as either its massive 17-inch sibling or the Titanium -- nor is it meant to be. At $1,799 -- $500 less than the 867MHz Titanium and $500 more than the 12-inch 800MHz iBook -- it effectively straddles the PowerBook and iBook product lines.

MyAppleMenu : Wintel News
-------------------------
Microsoft At Midlife: Bill Gates' View Of The Future (Brier Dudley, Seattle Times)
<http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134639839_microsoft23.html>
With the enthusiasm of a science student working on a killer project, Gates talks excitedly about putting together software he thinks may change the world.

Microsoft's Latest Movie Maker A Rough Cut (Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45288-2003Feb21.html>
The saying goes that Microsoft doesn't get a product right until the 3.0 version, and that sounds like the case with Windows Movie Maker. The current version could use more time in the studio.

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

MyAppleMenu Tomorrow : Top Stories
----------------------------------
Questions About Google Acquisition (David F. Gallagher, New York Times)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/technology/24BLOG.html?ex=1046667600&en=f8833575c3b7fbea&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND>
People with knowledge of the deal, which gave Pyra founders and investors shares in privately held Google, say it was signed without any real plan as to how the two companies would work together.

Why Did Google Want Blogger? (Leander Kahney, Wired News)
<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,57754,00.html>
Forget war and strife, the only news that mattered on the Web this week was Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs, the scrappy San Francisco startup behind the Blogger weblogging tool.

3 Years Ago: Linux In Every Lap (Lydia Lee, Salon)
<http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/02/24/eazel/index.html?sid=640006>
Stars of the original Mac development team try to solve one of the hottest puzzles in technology today: How to make the Linux desktop user-friendly.

MyAppleMenu Tomorrow : News & Opinions
--------------------------------------
New Copyright Laws Will Cost You (Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com)
<http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-985693.html>
Don't look now, but a team of lobbyists and politicians is gearing up to enact new digital copyright laws that will cost you more money and result in more government regulations.

Opera Won't Perform On Microsoft Phones (Matt Loney, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2100-1033-985658.html>
Opera, which recently launched its Small-Screen Rendering technology designed to make it easy to read standard Web pages on "smart phones," last week said it would never offer a version for Microsoft-powered devices such as the Orange SPV. The announcement means that users of Windows-CE based phones are likely to be confined to using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, which many consider inferior when it comes to smart phones and personal digital assistants.

Cisco To Give Away Wi-Fi Technology (Sandeep Junnarkar, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2100-1033-985672.html>
The network equipment maker said it would license software designed to improve the security and range of wireless networks that use Wi-Fi technology--the reigning standard among wireless technologies that has grown in popularity among consumers in the past year. Corporations, however, have been slow to adopt the new technology out of security concerns.

Nanotech To Pave Way For Micro-Machines (Michael Kanellos, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2100-1001-985770.html>
 Nanotechnology--the science of making devices with features measuring less than 100 nanometers (or one-ten-millionth of a meter)--will let companies make smaller and cheaper products than ever before, which in turn will lead to new markets, according to Albert Pisano, a professor of engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.

Cable Operators Pledge To Keep Net Open (Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2100-1033-985753.html>
In a letter sent Friday to the Federal Communications Commission, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association said that "cable operators have no intention of blocking access to content" and that no government regulations are necessary to guarantee this.

In Web Disputes, U.S. Law Rules The World (Michael Geist, The Star)
<http://www.torontostar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035778088598&call_pageid=968350072197&col=969048863851>
The larger threat comes not from courts asserting jurisdiction over online activity, but rather from national legislatures that create laws that are expressly designed to apply not just in their own country but worldwide.

Wi-Fi Standard 'To Plug All Holes' (Stephen Lawson, Macworld UK)
<http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?NewsID=6001>
The forthcoming IEEE 802.11i standard will plug all known security holes in IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs, also known as Wi-Fi, but probably won't have final approval or be shipping in products until about a year from now.

Broadband Companies Cheer Ruling (Simon Romero and Matt Richtel, New York Times)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/technology/24GEAR.html>
The decision by the Federal Communications Commission last week to retain many of the rules that govern local telecommunications markets but to exempt high-speed Internet services has given some Silicon Valley companies reason to cheer.

Ratings Agency Says It Erred In Measuring Web Site Use (Saul Hansell, New York Times)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/technology/24NET.html>
ComScore Media Metrix, one of the leading companies that measure Web site audiences, has discovered flaws in the methodology that it introduced in October, and it has restated its measurements for the last three months of 2002.

'Five Years From Now You'll See Virtually No CD Stores' (Joan Anderman, Boston Globe)
<http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/054/living/_Five_years_from_now_you_ll_see_virtually_no_CD_stores_+.shtml>
On the eve of the Grammy Awards, the recording industry is under siege: As the Internet drives a file-sharing revolution, it's the end of the (music) world as we know it.

The End Of The Old PC As We Know It? (Rupert Goodwins, CNET News.com)
<http://news.com.com/2100-1001-985600.html>
For more than 20 years, the PC has relied on the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), a small set of fixed software routines normally built into a chip on the motherboard. This hangover from a distant past is causing more and more problems, said Mark Doran, Intel's principal engineer behind the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) that aims to humanely kill the antique technology.

4 Years Ago: Hotline To The Underground (Janelle Brown, Salon)
<http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/02/24feature.html>
It was invented by a teenager. It's simple to use. And it can turn anyone's computer into a server of legal or illegal files.

MyAppleMenu Reader : World
--------------------------
Two Decades Of Warnings, And Now Duct Tape (Robert L. Bartley, Wall Street Journal)
<http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=110003113>
The military has digested the lesson, to be sure, and has developed equipment and doctrine to fight in a chemical or biological environment. But in terms of public awareness and terrorist threats, we have spent the last two decades in a state of denial.

Fortress America (Matthew Brzezinski, New York Times)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/magazine/23FORTRESS.html>
As a culture, our tolerance for fear is low, and our capacity to do something about it is unrivaled. We could have the highest degree of public safety the world has ever seen. But what would that country look like, and what will it be like to live in it?

MyAppleMenu Reader : Science & Tech
-----------------------------------
When All That's Left Is A Name (Joanna Glasner, Wired News)
<http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,57722,00.html>
Putting a corporate logo on top of a big building is supposed be a way for companies to tout their success to the world. But for many technology and telecommunications companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, prominent nameplates are turning out to be beacons of brand-name obsolescence.

MyAppleMenu Reader : Life
-------------------------
It's Come To This: Carry-On Steak (David Shaw, Los Angeles Times)
<http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-matters19feb19001433,1,4503592.column?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dfood>
Long before airlines began cutting back on service -- long before the advent of JetBlue Airways and other no-frills outfits that don't even serve meals -- I began to implement one of my Guiding Principles of Life: Whenever possible, turn a negative into a positive, convert a burden into a pleasure.

Pornography Goes From XXX To Zzz (Linton Weeks, Washington Post)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55971-2003Feb23.html>
The popularization of pornography is everywhere. In the suburbs, the shopping mall, the movie theater, the radio, the television, our living rooms: Pop Porn.

You Bought The Wine. Now What's For Dinner? (Amanda Hesser, New York Times)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/19/dining/19RIES.html>
With wines as inexpensive and as readily available as they are today, it is only natural that the next leap is to begin pairing wines with dinner.

Let Your Characters Tell You The Story (Joyce Maynard, New York Times)
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/24/books/24MAYN.html>
Here's what I believe happens when a writer begins her story with an authentically realized character (as opposed to one from central casting, formed out of the necessity to see a certain preordained action take place). If she allows him to take shape slowly on the page, if she resists the urge to make assumptions based on what she thinks he should do, he'll take on a life of his own and very nearly reveal the direction of the story.

MyAppleMenu SingaporeSurf : News & Opinions
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Launch Of Common Password For All Government E-Services (Fiona Tan, Channel NewsAsia)
<http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/33199/1/.html>
More than 40 government agencies issue their own passwords for on-line transactions. Now the government wants a tidier system with just one password.

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

More
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Internet News <http://www.myapplemenu.com/internet/>
Linux News <http://www.myapplemenu.com/linux/>

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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; 1996-2003 Heng-Cheong Leong. All rights reserved.