Apple - iMac G5

Apple - iMac G5

Oh nooooo! Now there's something else I have to hold myself back from buying!

It starts at $1299! Probably $1199 educational! And then if I write it off, then it's like it's only $800. Which is... still more than I can afford. Especially now that my amazing brother has fixed my PowerBook G4, literally by looking at it. It was a total brick -- wouldn't boot, wouldn't power off unless I unplugged it, got hot enough to fry an egg on -- then I put it in a suitcase and went to Seattle. Dan plugged it in, opened it, and it came up pretty-as-you-please. I reset the PMU, and it's been a great bedside dvd player ever since. Yep, see, that's the problem with having hardware stop working for a few weeks: I started relying on my tablet pc. At this juncture, at least, the brand-new tablet pc works. It regularly horrifies me, true, but...



Oh my god, the new iMac comes with wireless keyboard and mouse. I know that's nothing new, it's just so... beautiful.

geekiest protest ever

Whoever thought of this is just seriously brilliant.

Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date for Broad Availability Of Windows "Longhorn" Client Operating System

Wow! Microsoft Announces 2006 Target Date for Broad Availability Of Windows "Longhorn" Client Operating System! There's a date!



Oh! Theyu're going to make Avalon and Indigo available for WinXP in 2006!!!!!! That is huge and I think it's good news for Avalon.



Interesting, though: they're releasing WinFS after the first Longhorn OS release.

Joe Marini on XAML

Channel9 has posted an interview with Joe Marini, who is my main contact for the project I'll be (hopefully) working on for the next year. In this interview, he gives an overview of XAML and talks about what's cool about it.

The blogosphere has much, much, much to say about Avalon and Longhorn. I am overwhelmed. I need to get a schedule out the door, like, tonight, so i can't afford to be sucked into the blogosphere.

entering the mists

I'm starting to look at Avalon, the presentation system within Longhorn, the next-gen operating system from Microsoft. All of what I'm about to say is public; no privileged information.

This interview Joe Beda: Is Avalon a way to take over the Web? and the subsequent discussion gives a decent picture of how Avalon fits into the web technologies strategy.

Joe Beda's article describes and responds to a variety of dicussion that emerged based on the interview. He includes the ridiculous claim, "in some ways you can thank Microsoft for enabling a mostly standards based web by making the browser a two horse race." Thank Microsoft for pushing standards? Hello? Maybe if you mean Microsoft standards. (I could go into a detailed analysis of that claim, but it's tangential, and thus left as an exercise for the reader.) A more helpful quote is, "Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is our attempt to reenergize the rich client at Microsoft." Aha! So that's what Avalon is!

More to follow-- there's an awful lot of stuff out there.