Ranting Geeks 5: Blogging Wars!

Welcome to Post 5 of the Ranting Geeks Blog!

To our non-exsistant readership we thank you for your most generous support! Tonight's topic is related to something that Bored and I do on a regular basis. Blogging that is. Now, it can be very confusing for the average or new user to pick out a blogging engine that is just right for you. There are many of them out there. This blog is hosted on Blogger, a service by Google. Bored uses a blogging engine called LiveJournal which is a service that is run by blogging company Six Apart. But more on that later. Other services include Live Spaces, a blogging engine run by Microsoft in conjuction with it's Live Services (this was fomerly known as MSN Spaces.) Another blogging engine by Six Apart is something that is currently by invation only. It's called Vox.

I thought I'd start out with an overview of the features on each service. Blogger where we post, as many of you probably know, isn't the most straightforward thing to use. It requires some knowledge of HTML, which the average user may not have. But HTML can be learned - I taught myself, with the aid of websites - and Blogger's a powerful tool, once you learn to work with it. It's easy to customize it to exactly what you want. I'm still fairly new to it, myself - Virtunate and I found it was the best service for what we wanted and it was the only one that would truly let us collaborate.

Now onto LiveJournal, where my own personal blog is hosted. It started out small, got big - and in my opinion, seems to have fallen, now. The sense of community there is great, it's straightforward for an inexperienced user to set up their own blog or for a more savy user to code their blog's layout to make it look unique. In the early days of LiveJournal, before it was acquired by Six Apart, as I understand it, if one had a "Free" account (Now simply called "Basic"), it was impossibly slow. If one had a "Paid" account (Now called "Premium") and paid the service fees - something like 25 US dollars a year - you got access to different servers, which made it behave better.

I've found a few pitfalls in LiveJournal since I joined and so have people who have been there longer. The area to customize one's journal is hidden, parts of the help/FAQ are vague. If you opt to customize your journal, if you have the skill to create something yourself, it seems to have it's own version of CSS that's useless anywhere else. I've considered getting a Paid/Premium account - but they're not offering much to tempt me. Voice posting - only available to US residents. (As a Canadian, that hurt, LJ. That hurt.) Space for images - when there are free hosting services such as Photobucket.

LJ seems to have a little more simplicity, under new management - but some things deserve to be tweaked. Just a few little tweaks.

Windows Live Spaces. *tsk tsk tsk* My first blog was on MSN Spaces and I thought it was the best thing in the world. It had all these shiny new themes, a great blogging engine, lists to show people what you like in books, musis and other things. But to say the least is it probably one of the least powerful on our list. For one thing, there was practically no way to move around what where called "modules" in your Space. You had your Blog Module, your Photoalbum Module, your "Lists" (who needs lists?) your contacts, your profile and a few other things. You couldn't code your own themes using HTML and it didn't look like a real webpage. You could add a movie or music module, however this took a considerable amount of effort and was not sanctioned by Microsoft. For one thing, for those nerds in our audience, most blogging engines are written in PERL which is a programming language. Livejournal is written in PERL, as are many other blogging engines.Vox, which has yet to be discussed, is written in something called AJAX which is a combination of HTML, CSS,XML and Java Script. But more on that later. Spaces did have one feature that I do miss in other blogging engines. An advanced statistics keeping system. You could see how many people viewed your space on any given day or week and see who they where according to their name or MSN Space. In Short, MSN Spaces is the type of blogging engine that someone from the ages 9-14 would use. Or the type of person who's perfectly happy with a really cruddy looking webpage, go to MSN Spaces.

I used MSN Spaces, as it was then (it's now Windows Live Spaces) for a very brief period. Probably for about a total of four posts. It seemed useless to me and doesn't give the sense of community that LiveJournal or Vox do. It's great, if you don't care for customization and want annoying "modules" all over the place. I had no use for some of them and wanted them to go away. And I wasn't able to tweak it - even with LiveJournal, using a provided theme, I can do that. It's great for a youngster - or someone new to computers. I believe an elderly man I know has a blog on Spaces that he maintains for his family. It's simple to set up and post - but not simple to edit or change anything.

Onto my favorite blogging engine right now: Vox. It is by far the easiest of the blogging engines to use and one of most power ful for oraganzing and using content within posts. Vox is currently an invite only service although just recently, Six Apart has opened up the invite process. Vox is based on the conpcept of a neighborhood. You have three types of people in Vox: Family, Friends and Neighbors. There are a number of themes that can be chosen from, including those from San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Paris, New York and Washington DC among others. There are are themes including sea, forest, hills, color themes. There are are 87 themes in all. You also have the option of customizing your layout with 4 layouts and the ability to dictate what people see on your blog. If you have no videos you can choose not to show the video section. And here's the thing that I love the most about Vox. If you don't want someone to see some content within a post you can still publish the post without someone seeing the content. For example, if I didn't want a regular user to see some photos I put in a post I could make the post public but have only my friends or family view the photos. This is true with all content and I think one of the defining features of Vox.

I was invited to Vox.. and I enjoy the service. It's probably one of the better services I've seen, for blogging. Being in a "beta" phase, it doesn't have all the customization I'd want yet, but I'll give it time. Like what Virtunate mentioned, it's simple. If there's a song you're enjoying, upload it and share it. Let your friends listen to things before they go buy a CD. The only thing I truly miss from LiveJournal that I wish Vox had is clients. LiveJournal offers desktop clients - you can post or upload photos with the use of that, without being on the site. It simplifies things. But as Vox is a new service, I'm willing to be patient and give it time to develop.

And, just to make it clear, neither one of us works for Six Apart. It isn't biased - they just offer good services.

Yes they do, My recommendation for a Blogging Service is this: If you're someone who loves customization and would like to design your own templates, go with Blogger. If your somone who likes the easy way out go with Spaces. If your someone who likes a bit of both go with Vox. If you would like an invite I currently have 1 left. The first member of our (non exsistant) readership to email me will recieve it.

And... if anybody's actually reading and wants a Vox invite, I have two. Pop off an email - first come, first served.

Until Next Week, I'm Virtunate, I'm Bored SVU Nut
See you next Time

Due to the fact that I have a busy work schedule, Bored and I have decided that this Blog will be updated on a weekly basis. Onto tonight's topic: P2P filesharing

P2P filesharing has been around for a long time. It was popularized starting in 2002, when the use of broadband Internet became widespread. I was introduced to a lovely little program called Kazaa. It wasn't that great of program, though. Riddled with spyware and adware, it caused problems for my system. I used Kazaa and other P2P programs on and off until about 2003 when I quit altogether. The idea that is filesharing has been around for about 15 years. But as stated above, it didn't become popular until around 2002. In the late nineties it was impractical to download a file that was several megabytes due to the fact that connection speed was slow. For example I tried to download a 36 MB audio file on a dial-up connection on Monday morning. Granted, that the connection isn't at full speed, but I doubt a few kilobits would make a difference. With the size of files the way they are, it was (and still is) impractical. With file sizes ranging from 5-35 MB it's impractical to download a file on anything less than a 1 MB connection. And just think, if you're downloading something like video. The file sizes could double, possibly even triple.

I believe "filesharing" has been around for a while, as Virtunate suggests, in IRC chat rooms in the 1990's. But with more powerful computers, developing technology and broadband Internet really brought it into popularity. I saw Kazaa and similar programs crash someone's computer, multiple times, due to the malware that came along with them. I've never used a peer-to-peer program, myself. I have quite the CD collection - and when I bought said CDs, I believed I was supporting the artists. Which isn't actually true; the record label makes the money off CDs, for the most part - but that's rather irrelevant.

I can imagine users downloading content from a peer-to-peer network - songs, at the earliest, but now videos and software - and having no idea what they were doing was illegal, especially when it first came to popularity. And it is illegal, in most countries, although I'm not sure about my native Canada. You're violating copyright law, among other things. In most places, if you're caught, it leads to nasty lawsuits and the RIAA on your tail.

But the fact is, the main file sharing networks may be down but there is a lovely program (multiple ones actually) called BitTorrent. Basically it's a progam that instead of drawing the bandwith from a single source, draws it from multiple sources. Technology Journalist Leo Laporte gave us a good example. He seeds his podcast TWiT (This Week in Tech) on Bit Torrent evey Sunday Night. At this point it's an extremly slow download as the bandwith is only being drawn from Laporte and maybe a handful of other computers. However, by Monday morning the download is extremely fast, as hundreds if not thousands are downloading TWiT via BitTorrent. So if the file you're looking for is in high demand, you will get it quickly.

Content on BitTorrent is another matter. With the invention of Podcasting and Video Blogging/casting some of the content is legal to have under Creative Commons (CC) However some of it, including things like songs and movies are still illegal. So really the only advantage to BitTorrent is speed and lack of spy/malware.

This brings us to the point of tonight's entry: The PirateBay.org. One of the most infamous BitTorrent sites on the Internet, the Pirate Bay was raided in June by Swedish authorities, reportedly under pressure from the White House, which was, (reportedly) under pressure from the MPAA. So basically the MPAA didn't like what Pirate Bay was doing and shut it down. But it wasn't so easy. Although the Pirate Bay was shut down, it came back online in a matter of days becaue the Pirate Bay moved to a new set of servers in the Netherlands. It is now back in Sweden and it has recieved double the traffic it recived before the raid.

Actually, The Bay was back online before some news sources could get stories out of it's being down. And it's victory message was honestly rather amusing: hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.thepiratebay.org. (The APB is the Swedish equivalent to the US's MPAA.)

I don't support filesharing; it's illegal and having produced creative work of my own, I can understand why artists might be angry about it. I wouldn't enjoy it if someone took a piece of something I'd created and distributed it without my permission. Even though several of the big names on the Canadian music scene have said they back filesharing, I stay away from it. But I don't support the RIAA, either, truthfully. Stopping filesharing is understandable - but they want to put severe limitations on what you can do with music you buy and own. If they had their way, ripping a CD you bought and paid for to your computer's hard drive would most likely be illegal.

I'm on the fence about this. I know that stealing is wrong, but what if the artist backs filesharing? Then does the RIAA or the MPAA have the right to come after you? That makes a complex legal situation even more complex. The fact is this: If the the work is licensed under the proper form of Creative Commons (there are more than one) then I have no problem using said work as I desire, as long as it's within the terms of the license. If you want people just to look at your work, use the strictest CC there is. But the fact is, the RIAA and MPAA really shouldn't have the right to go after people that have downloaded and copied one song to a CD illegally, that they can sue that person for (insert large amount of money here). And they shouldn't be able to go after 13 year old kids or 85-year-old grannies either, especially if granny doesn't have a computer.

Our Advice: Don't download illegal files. It'll get you into a world of trouble you don't want to be in.

Downloading or using legal files licensed under Creative Commons doesn't bother me. It's the illegal ones I stay away from. Because I'm not in the mood to get arrested.

WWDC: The Shinier the Better

Well, the event that the press has been waiting for in the past few weeks has come and gone. WWDC has come and gone. The traditional "Stevenotes" keynote took place on Monday morning with more than just Steve Jobs' speaking to the developers. Several other guests from Apple's executive team previewed some of the features in the next release of the OS X operating system. VP of software engineering, Betrand Serlet, VP of worldwide marketing Phill Schiller and Scott Forestall, VP of Platform Experience. After an update from the Apple retail store, Phill Schiller took the stage to unviel the new Mac Pro high-end Apple desktop. The "single configuration" features dual Xeon 2.66 Ghz processors, 1 GB of memory a 250 GB Hard Drive, an advanced nvidia graphics card. As well you can drop in TWO Superdrives. The proccesor is upgradeable to 3 Ghz, the memory to 16 GB, the hard disk space to 2 TB and room for up to 3 more PCI-E graphics cards. Wow. That's a killer machine.

Wow is right. If only I had a few grand to spend on that killer machine. But I watched parts of the WWDC "Stevenotes"... and I'm truthfully more interested in the new version of OS X - Leopard. It's going to incorporate a "virtual desktop", which has been in Linux for years, tweaks to features carried over from Tiger, as well as a version of Boot Camp. There was speculation we were going to see Leopard released in the fall, but we won't see it until the spring of '07. I'm not believing Microsoft's January '07 release date for Windows Vista... if they are released about the same time, that would make for something interesting. I'm happy, however that seeing Leopard previewed might stop the ridiculous Photoshopp-ed imagery and videos with Tiger being masquaraded as Leopard.

I liked the the videos and the photos of Leopard. But I agree, it should be interesting to see who comes out on top. The fact is, although Apple came late into the game - because of some horrible corporate managment , OS X was delayed by almost 3 years. Although XP and OS X came out at the same time at the time, XP was superior in terms of features, while OS X had more security oriented features. Over the next five releases, OS X caught up to and passed XP. Now with the release of Vista just around the corner, Apple is readying it's next major weapon against Microsoft. Leopard, from what I've seen so far is going to smack Vista square in the face. Not only does it have more useful features like Time Machine, but it has support for 64-bit applications. And this brings up another point. Leopard has only two versions. One for a single user and one for a 5 user liceance. On the other hand, Vista has Starter, Home Premium, Bussiness, and on and on. Like Bored said, the showdown will come and the fact is, Microsoft better have all the bugs ironed out of Vista if it wants to compete with Apple or even if it wants to retain any of the respect of the geek community.

I have to disagree, somewhat. There's no way you can have all the bugs ironed out of a piece of software before it's released - I don't care who makes it. Not every single one of them - even if you test it to death. Some aren't found until the software is "in the wild", so to speak. With every user having a different system configuration and what they do with the machine and OS varying, some bugs don't come up until after release. You have to hope, for Microsoft's sake however, that they get most of the serious ones ironed out. But who knows? Leopard could be buggy. Apple's OS 9 wasn't great, if anyone remembers. There could be a chance they'll both performe equally... or one could fall below the other, in the minds of users. And I'd honestly not rather make a prediction on which one will perform better. You don't know which one actually does perform better until you're hands-on with it, is my belief. And I can't run the Windows Vista beta on my machine, so I don't have a comment. And then it comes down to the users, as well. There are those who are fans of one platform or the other, of course and will never think of buying the competitor's software... but then you've got users like myself, who don't care about brand loyalty... I base my choices on what performs the best for my own needs. What do I want out of a piece of software? Which will do it better?

One of the things that I was hoping on at the Stevenotes speech on Monday was an upgrade to the new processors in both the notebook and desktop lines. Although the iMac and the Macbook's are fast as is I would love to see a processor upgrade. Especially in the iMac. I would love to see a 2 Ghz processor 17" iMac. Before Apple transitioned to the Intel chips, the lowest end iMac was 1.9 Ghz as apposed to the 1.83 Ghz Intel. Now that might not seem like much, but when you're doing something like Audio or video eiditing, then the smallest amount of proceesor speeds. If they upgrade the processor in the 20" iMac with a 2.33 Ghz, or even a 2.16 Ghz processor and they bring up the speed of the 17" iMac I'll be happy and without hesitation. go out and buy an iMac.

Well, that's all for us,
Sorry this post took so long to get out.
I'm Virtunate and this is Bored SVU Nut.... is there anybody reading to say goodbye to?

Weare Ranting Geeks and we Ranted!

Browser Wars: Firefox vs Opera vs Internet Explorer
Just to clarify the format of these posts, Bored and I are using two different fonts to differentiate on who is speaking in the posts. She is using the Georgia font while I will use the Trebuchet MS font. On to tonight's post:

Is anyone here using IE? Anyone? All righty then, as stats would indicate, over 73% of users use Internet Explorer. Well, I'm here to tell you that there are alternatives to Internet Explorer. In fact, you might have seen some of them around the Internet. Anyone here know of the "Get Firefox" campaign? Well, here's a long story short. Back when Netscape was shut down in 2003, two years after being aquired by AOL in 2001, a bunch of the Netscape engineers formed an organization called the Mozilla Foundation. From that came the browser that we know as Mozilla Firefox. Netscape.com still exsists, but that's for another post. Netscape was developed on an engine called Gecko, the engine that now runs Firefox. So, in essence, Firefox is the stepchild of Netscape. The ironic thing is, Firefox is more succesful in it's first 1 1/2 years than Netscape was in the nine years that Netscape exsisted.

Users tend to be fond of Internet Explorer because for Windows users, it's right there in front of them. It comes literally embedded in Windows. Users on other platforms use it as well, because most web developers only thought about what their page would look like in IE... not in other browsers. To get a page to display properly - or at all, in cases - one would be stuck with IE. But as a former IE user who's now typing this post while using Firefox, I can tell you which one performs better. IE was always sluggish, ridiculously prone to crashing - and after hearing so many stories about how unsecure it was, I never felt safe using it.

No, I'm not saying that the other browsers don't have issues. No piece of software, no matter who develops it, is perfect. But Firefox and Opera are better-performing alternatives to IE. Plus, for the Windows user, they're not embedded into your OS.

Here I'm going showcase a little history on all three browser starting with Opera, the oldest of the three.

Opera

The oldest of the three browser and also the first browser to use tabbed browsing. Opera was started as a project from a Norweign telecom back in 1994. It was originally only develloped for Windows but spread to Linux and OS 9 (now OS X) after lack of use, in 1997 Opera software launched Project Magic to determine who would purchase a copy of the browser in there native OS. Opera is a go-between between Firefox and IE. Unlike Firefox which was a bare bones extendible browser since it's conception. Opera on the other had only had limited extensions, however it does have extra features like a built in BitTornnet client, voice recognition and an Email client. It is also one of the few browsers (beside's Apple's Safari) that has passed the Acid2 test. Opera is an interesing browser, however huge dents in system resources, lack of extenibility and a glitchy plugin manager have led me to believe that although Opera is a nice browser, it needs some work under the hood to become a major player.

Opera does have great potential. Switching, however takes some time to get used to. I have Opera 9.01, currently - and it offers functionality where Firefox does not, in some places. It's passing the Acid2 test gives it potential - and so do the features decided for accessibility, such as being able to tweak the colors and font sizes, as well as the ability to control the browser with just a keyboard, a mouse - or neither one, as you can tell it how to work with your voice. Zooming in and out is simple (I accidently did it yesterday) by simply pressing the + or - keys. The built-in BitTorrent client is very user friendly - I didn't use to download, but even having never used BitTorrent before, I was able to get it working so I could download, if I wished. It is web standards compliant, which is a nice touch... and I think, if Opera 9 is any indication, with further development, it will be a major player.

Internet Explorer

So we come the browser that started it all.....Internet Exploder Explorer. Internet Explorer was once the King of Browsers, but it has fallen off the cliff in the past few years. And this isn't just the Browser Fanboy in me talking. Technology experts Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corperation and technology journalist Leo Laporte both strongly advocate the use of Firefox, because of the fact that many, many vulerabilities remain unpatched in IE - leaving the user exposed to malicous pieces of code.

Back in the days of Netscape, Internet Explorer was King. It was better than Netscape. But that was then, this is now. Internet Explorer has been lapped numerous times by Firefox and Opera. Microsoft is just now clueing into the fact that things like Tabbed Browsing and RSS are good things to intergrate into a browser. But you also have to give Microsoft a break, they don't develop as much as Mozilla or Opera, and therefore don't have as much feedback to go on. And the fact that Microsoft is closed source doesn't help it either. (Opera is closed source, but it is a smaller code base and easier to update.) People aren't allowed to modify or experiment with the code base of IE. Microsoft needs to pay people to fix problems. Firefox pays ordinary people to find bugs. Mozilla will give someone who finds a legit bug a $500 reward and a Firefox t-shirt per report. So if I was to isolate myself in my room for a long period of time and scour the Firefox code, I could buy a new computer just by looking for bugs. Internet Explorer, although better now, unless they go open source, will never regain the ground they have lost and are losing now. Thanks to projects like Firefox (and look alike Flock) IE is doomed to be left in the dust, sooner rather than later. In 2005, PC World rated Internet Explorer the eigth worst tech product of all time.

When the Internet was new and shiny, IE was king, I agree. It was an alternative to Netscape - which honestly deserved to go down the toilet sooner than it did. But those days have passed. IE hasn't been overhauled since the Internet was very young. It hasn't kept up with the times. Enter new projects like Firefox, which is just nearing it's second birthday - and is more stable, more secure - and makes web browsing far less annoying. And older projects like Opera, whose developers are aware of the times and keep up with them.

I'm willing to give Internet Explorer 7 a chance... but it's a little too late coming. IE already has it's reputation as Internet Exploder. To be fair to Microsoft, however, they are closed-source - no amateurs like myself or Virtunate can look at the code and fix bugs for them... and they do have a massive marketshare. I believe when they ship an update or something new, it has to be translated into 23-plus languages, for users around the world. But... the browser is not standards compliant, in any form. And IE 6 hadn't been changed much at all since it's release, oh, five years ago? It's outdated, unstable - anyone who probably reads this is aware how much things can change in five years in the technology world. And they wonder why they're losing ground.

Firefox

While not the "King" of web browsers, Firefox is definitely a rising star. Since it's release in 2004, it has taken the browser market by storm. Not only has it won acclaim from the geek community, but it has recieved numerous awards from PC Magazine and CNet amoung others. It's only been out about a year and a half and it's already had over 100 million downloads. As metioned above, Firefox is designed from Netscape technology, namely the Gecko rendering engine. Although it has yet to pass the Acid2 test, its still a great browser. Firefox is what you would call an extendable browser. By default it only starts out with one, default theme and no extensions. You can load as many extensions and themes as you want. I currently have eight extensions running. Notable amoung them Stumble Upon, Mouse Gestures and Flashblock. And here's the best part. If your tech-savy, you can write your own extensions. The only problem is with extensions that the Firefox team doesn't check for memory leaks and that can lead to the browser taking up more system resources. Although not nearly as leaky as Opera, it can still stack up 30,000 K of system resources. Firefox has gained popularity over it's two year life and shows no signs of slowing down. With the release of Firefox 2 this fall, Firefox's popularity should grow even further. Unless the codebase takes a dive in the next release, I will continue to use Firefox for years to come. Having migrated to Opera twice, I find it does not compare to Firefox for the reasons I have mentioned above.

Firefox is taking a bite out of the browser market... taking territory that used to belong to IE. No, it hasn't passed the Acid2 test like Opera - but it's still considerably tighter than IE. It's great for customization... you can get the browser looking looking and behaving however you'd like it to. But, there is a hitch with the extensions and themes like Virtunate mentioned... as they're coded by outsiders... usually just users with some skill and some time - the code may not be perfect. It's not tested by the folks at Mozilla. Which can lead to the memory leakage, even though it's been reported in Firefox without extensions. I have also had an extension crash my browser, so it's kind of user beware, but the extensions are not mandatory. You don't need them - but they are there. And if you report a bug to the creator of an extension, they will acknowledge you - and work on fixing it.

It is an open-source alternative. For the likes of me, who don't enjoy supporting the big corporations, it's great. And also for the likes of me, who don't have the most high-end of computer systems, it runs very well. The browser is updated regularly... and if you're tech-savy and want to tweak it yourself, you can. The source code is available.


So now comes our recommendation: What should you use? For users of the power user type, we recommend Opera, as it is more an all-in-one browser. It allows multi-tasking with widgets, BitTorrent, et cetera. For people who are just surfing and like expandibility and ability to change appearance at will we recommend Firefox.
You can get Opera Here and Firefox Here

That's all for tonight. Monday evening we will return with coverage of the Apple WWDC Conference.
I'm Virtunate and this is Bored SVU Nut... Goodnight, the non-existant readership.

We are the Ranting Geeks and we Ranted!

Welcome to the first post of the Ranting Geeks blog. I'm Bored SVU Nut and my friend Virtunate and I will be sharing our opinions on the world of technology. Be forewarned that we are very opinionated people so If we offend you with our very agressive opinions, please, don't be offended by it. Virtunate here is a little bit biased when it comes to all things Mac - but I think he can swallow it for this.

Bored, on the other hand, is a bit crazy about all things shiny. For example, if she finds some new gadget on Engadget, her eyes wil glaze over and a puddle of drool will form on the ground beneath where she is sitting. This also happens when she is viewing the Falcon Northwest, Alienware or Apple sites. Depending on our work scedules we will post on this blog two to three times on a week, on days that we can. If you don't see a post, it's because real life dragged us out of our respective basements. As for the format of the posts, we will cover two news items or editorials in each post.

Tonight's topic is: Speculation for WWDC. So without further addo, here is tonight's blog post.

Speculation for WWDC

With Apple's World Wide Developers Conference only three days away, the rumor mill at sites like Macworld, ThinkSecret and Apple Insider have gone into overdrive, with rumors flying left, right and center about the new Mac Pro, the next version of OS X, and most recently, the "iChat Mobile". Leander Kahney of Wired News Reports that a fake video was posted on YouTube today. It shows the "iPhone" in operation. Although there are some similarities, the device in the video is not in operation and does not show the menu system or the user interface that you would expect to see in such a video.

The "iPhone" or "iChat Mobile" - I can imagine Apple creating a device like this at some point, considering they've put iTunes on various cell phones and it's probably time they do their own - but I can't imagine them releasing it at WWDC, which is a developer's conference. For developers. Not the general public. And considering the patents Apple has filed for touchscreens, et cetera, I like to believe that maybe it's an "iTablet" they've been working on?

I agree wholeheartedly. WWDC is meant to be a place where Apple can talk to the people who design the software that makes Macintosh an established brand. If they where going to release a new iPod or the "iChat Mobile" it would be released at Macworld next January, which is much more of a press event than WWDC.

Another confirmed rumor is the preview of OS X 10.5 "Leopard", the next version of the OS X operating system. Rumors about system features have been swirling for months. From a revamped Finder to a program combining iCal and Address Book to new features in the iChat client for VOIP. Over the past few months, there have been fake videos, screenshots and images of what Leopard will look like. It is unclear what features will be carried over from Tiger and what features will be added. Apple has confirmed that it will include an improved version of the Boot Camp virtualization software as well as some form of a BiTorrent Client that will seed updates for users using a customer's bandwidth. In return, the user will recieve some form of compensation. It is unclear at this time wheather the compensation will be discounts on the Apple or iTunes Music store, this is mere speculation. This is not a confirmed feature.

It's all speculation, I agree. We never know what Apple is going to do, because they're so secretive. The addition of Boot Camp is an excellent one. It could possibly give Apple a larger market share with customers who want to switch - but are tied to a Windows PC by the software they need to use. Boot Camp will give them option to dual-boot and even though Boot Camp has been available, including it with Leopard might make more people inclined to dual-boot? I'm interested to see they might do with Finder in Leopard, most of all.

The most exciting and anticipated piece of news from Apple is the Mac Pro high-end desktop. Back in 2004, CEO Steve Jobs promised both developers and consumers a 3.0 Ghz PowerMac Desktop. A year later, there is no 3 Ghz desktop. Jobs attributed it to the fact that the PowerPC chips that Apple was using had reached their limit of modification and that Apple would now use Intel Chips. A year later, 90% of the Macintosh hardware line is converted. All that remains is the Xserve, the Xserve RAID, and the Mac Pro (PowerMac) AppleInsider has created a modified PowerMac inclosure with a second optical drive slot and has speculated that this second slot would be used for a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive. And this machine will be smokin. Apple either will use the new Xeon "Woodcrest" chipset or the "Conroe" chipset. Either way it will be an 8-core machine. Each chip contains two cores. Times that by four chips and you've got an eight core machine. This is very exciting and we can't wait for WWDC to get here on Monday.

I'm Virtunate and this is Bored... and if anyone's reading this post, well, we hope you enjoyed it. Is there a reason our first post was about Macs, though?

We are the Ranting Geeks and we ranted!