Technology

Thanks to the success of Firefox, Mozilla now appears to have 14.9% of the browser share, double that of 9 months ago. Let this be a lesson in complacency — via Slashdot

If you ask anyone who cares about the look of their HDTV or graphics workstation display, they’ll tell you the same thing: LCDs don’t reproduce colour very well. But over the next few years, that situation may change, thanks to improved backlighting using LED technology

Philadelphia has unveiled an ambitious plan to coat the city with Wi-Fi, using a mix of public and private funds to provide the service. Dianah Neff, the city’s CIO, has presented a proposal to mayor John Street that would see all of Philadelphia’s 1.6m residents receive the wireless web by late 2005 or early 2006. The city hopes to complement existing wireless services at hotels, coffee shops, businesses and homes while also opening up wireless access to some residents who might be unable to afford typical high-speed Internet costs. The city expects the initial rollout to cost $10m with annual maintenance costs coming in around $1.5m

A firewall designed to eliminate spam has been developed at Queensland University. The researchers say it is the only true spam firewall in existence, and are chasing investors to help take the breakthrough system to market. Co-developer Matthew Sullivan, a specialist systems programmer, said the spam firewall relied on a statistical learning method, or Support Vector Machine, to categorise e-mails. It is the only anti-spam software that analyses emails as a whole picture rather than based on components, such as keywords or phrases

The ACT police are warning Internet users to be wary of a new e-mail scam that deceptively alerts the recipient that their identity has been stolen. ACT Detective-Sergeant Fiona Sagripanti said the latest scam has the subject Your ID was stolen and attempts to persuade the user to visit a web site

New iMac G5 unveiled

But where’s the cpu? Dude it’s in the screen.

Wow.

Not too keen on the slot loading optical drive, but wow, that’s one hell of a design. Don’t know how effective the cooling will be, some Apple rumour sites have been speculating about cooling probs being a reason for it’s delayed release. But that’s probably me being too picky or paranoid.

Love that crisp turquoisey-ceraulean-blue Apple are using in their graphics these days. Apple’s visual identity evolves as their products evolve, but that’s another soapboxy design entry for later.

What do you call a man with too much time, a jet engine and his mother-in-law’s wheelchair? An embarrassing headline waiting to happen

Australia is two years behind comparable developed countries in broadband services despite an accelerated uptake that doubled subscribers in the past year. The advent of less expensive entry-level products drove demand. However, the uptake of broadband services still lags countries such as the US, Canada and Sweden by a wide margin

A circular concept printer, that uses rotational, instead of linear, movement to reduce its size, was one of 130 winners of the 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Awards — via boingboing

Photos supposedly taken in a Paris airport elevator hit the Web on Thursday, fuelling rumours that the new machine will be similar to Apple’s new line of flat-panel displays, with the guts of the computer behind the LCD screen. The photos — which have not been verified as authentic — show a slim all-in-one computer inside the familiar Apple packaging, down to the signature black-and-white box

Work replaced my cruddy windows box for a G5 with a 20 inch cinema display. Now this is a design machine! It’s whisper quite, very stable going between Photoshop and Illustrator and just the usual mac gorgeousness encased in aluminium. This machine makes other things possible that my old one had either extreme difficulty or impossibility doing. For instance, right now, I am working on a 14 MB file (not huge), in Photoshop, going between my text editor, (BBedit), FTP client (Rbrowser Lite), Mail, iCal, Safari, IE 5.2 and drumroll… listening to a CD in iTunes! Yep, I couldn’t have the equivalent apps open at once while listening to a CD on my old machine, Photoshop would slow up, screen might not render terribly fast. But not now, I can listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers — Live in Hyde Park (highly reccomended) and go about my usual work stuff no probs!

My other annoyance was the colour, screen, graphics card and their interaction or lack thereof, with graphics apps. Sometimes 1px wide vertical lines would appear as two even though I new this was not so. I couldn’t get the geometry totally right either. Colour calibration was not fun on previous set up, despite having Illustrator and Photoshop set up to use the Adobe 1998 RGB profile. If I had to take screen shots, I had to do this weird song and dance, converting everything from my monitor colour space to what I wanted, to back again! Go figure! Quite often saving for web produced weird results, but resaving it fixed it. Go figure! Didn’t quite help when two geeks from work gave it a shot either. They thought they new a little about colour management. Go figure!

Such a grand screen demands a grand desktop. I haven chosen the puprle spookiness of Ravenswood Manor from pixelhuset.

The screen is gorgeous! It even comes with it’s own aluminium grey coloured cleaning cloth! How cool is that! The clarity and colour is in-fucking-credible! And the wide screen format is equally useful, I can have my psd file with my code window side by side, or a browser window. Or whatever. It’s fan-bloody-tastic! Of course Expose also makes light work of finding the appropriate document.

As I have a snazzy graphics tablet, this means I can use Inkwell to draw or write anywhere on the screen and use it in other apps as I see fit. Nice. I need to play around with it a bit more, but still nice. I haven’t played around with Fontbook as much as I’d like to, but I love what I see so far. A useless but human detail I like is in the login screen, if you enter your details incorrectly it shakes the login panel left to right like it’s saying, uh-uh! Nope!. Go on all you Panther (10.3.5) users, try it. I’ve been logging in wrong on purpose almost every morning just to see it!

Okay not so crash hot stuff: white mouse and keyboard. I am a grot. It’s already dirty. The tower is heavy I can’t lift it. Alright that’s to be expected.

Now I need some accessories: some speakers, headphones, keyboard cover might be an option. A proper graphics tablet cover would also be nice come to think of it.

RIKEN, an anglicised acronym for Japan’s Research Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, described in the US overnight the MDGrape 3, a processor it thinks will become the cornerstone of future supercomputing efforts

Following a deal with software developer CodeWeavers in June, Lycoris has released PowerPak 1.4 which incorporates Window PCs emulation into its Linux desktop software

Swiftbroadband and Exetel have announced that they will offer wireless broadband services via the Unwired network, which, according to the provider, covers 90% of Sydney’s population equating to 1.2 million homes and 240,000 small-to-medium enterprises

Bugmenot, the incredibly useful site that helps bypass compulsory web registration, got yanked after its spineless web hosting company caved to external pressure. Fortunately, they are back on the air with a shiny new host that has a vested interest in free speech