A lot has been written about Safari over the past several days, and a lot of what’s been written has been negative. Many people seem to have a lot of “Mac vs. PC” baggage that is spilling out into the open with Apple’s announcement of a Windows Safari release. I’ve never used Safari on a Mac, so I’ve been looking forward to trying out the Windows release and seeing it for myself. I finally got the opportunity to download it a couple of days ago, and I’ve been using it heavily ever since.
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As a long-time Palm user I was very interested in Palm’s recent announcement of its new Palm Foleo. The Foleo is an intriguing device, positioned halfway between a laptop computer and a personal digital assistant like my Palm M505. Palm calls the Foleo a “smartphone companion.”
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Jeff Duntemann had an interesting post on concurrency and its effects on popular programming languages, and Michael Covington mentioned concurrent programming a week and a half later. You may have seen television commercials advertising computers with dual-core CPU’s. The problem from a programmer’s standpoint is that a computer with two CPU’s is not automatically twice as fast as a computer with a single CPU.
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Here’s a headline that might revolutionize what laptop computers, cell phones, and PDA’s look like in the future: Sony develops film-thin, bending display.
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That title isn’t a joke on my part; it’s the name of the lesson plan used at Georgia Tech in a course “aimed at reigniting interest in computer science among undergraduates.” According to an article in Forbes, educators are trying to reverse the trend against majoring in computer science by changing the curriculum to attract people who are not mathematically inclined.
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Dell and Wal-Mart have entered into an agreement to sell Dell computers in Wal-Mart stores. According to CyberNet News, starting this month Wal-Mart will offer the Dimension E521 with or without its 19-inch monitor. According to Dell’s web site, the E521 “can be built with a range of AMD processors,” comes pre-loaded with Windows Vista, and is priced starting at $359. No one is saying what Wal-Mart’s version will look like or how much it will cost.
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My Microsoft wireless optical mouse, the Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0, is now officially deceased. For days it has double-clicked about every fourth time I single-clicked the left mouse button. Today the false double-click rate rose to about every other mouse click. You can imagine the problems that created in most applications, so I have reluctantly retired the wireless mouse and gone back to using my eight-year-old corded IntelliMouse.
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A study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project concludes that more Americans than ever before regard spam as merely an unpleasant fact of life, nothing to get too upset about. In fact, 28% of the survey respondents said that spam wasn’t a problem at all.
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According to the Associated Press, Intel will soon be removing the last of the lead from its processor chips as part of the company’s environmental campaign.
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My Compaq Presario came with Windows XP pre-loaded. That was very convenient in many ways, but one small disadvantage was that my name had been entered as Compaq_Owner and the picture at the top of my Start menu had been pre-specified as one of the stock images (in this case, chess pieces)! If I had installed Windows XP myself, I would have entered my name and specified an image during the installation process.
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