Author: tommytrc

ThinkSecret is about as reliable a source as you can get for these things, and they’re saying that next month Apple
is going to introduce a new iMac codenamed “Q88” that will retail for $499 and come without a built-in monitor
(something Apple should have done a long time ago, only the high-end PowerMac G5 desktops come without displays). The
new ghetto budget Mac is supposed to have a 1.25GHz processor, 256MB of RAM, either a 40GB or 80GB
hard drive, and a combo drive. Apple’s main motivation for swimming into the shallow end of the pool? To capitalize on
iPod owners who own PCs but say they would switch to a Mac if it were less expensive.

Originally posted by Peter Rojas from Engadget

So Time Warner Cable is apparently yakkin’ it up with Sprint, looking to buy cell service time on their network to
offer it up to their customers; they want to put it on trial in Kansas City in Q1 2005. What’s weirder is that their
consumer media, communications, and service offerings would then make Time Warner Cable (Time Warners, er, cable-TV
unit) otherwise unparalleled in their prolificacy, they being the only company to offer broadband, television, landline
phone, and cellphone service. All crappy, too.

Originally posted by Ryan Block from Engadget

Hepped up, hot rodding sister site Jalopnik reports that steam is hot—especially inside of cars, where a British Steam Car Challenge team plans to put the gaseous gas vapor. The ‘Inspiration’ is a 300 horsepower steam-fired car that might just hit 200mph with an turbine that will hit almost 12,000 rpm. The English engineers are perhaps best known for their work on the ‘Chamomilean,’ a color-changing tea pot that reached almost 10,000 tps (toots per second) in the 2nd Annual Grey Earl Poppycockery Exhibition and Kennel Run.

Inspiration Steam Car Aims for World Record [Jalopnik]

Originally from Gizmodo

A few weeks ago, when we had our story about Christmas lights causing problems with broadband connections, apparently Alek Komarnitsky stopped by here at Techdirt to tell everyone in the comments that he had set up his 17,000 Christmas lights so they could be turned on and off via the web. I had forgotten about this until earlier this morning when a friend instant messaged me to tell me he’s become addicted to the site and had been turning the lights on and off regularly. Well, it turns out my friend was taken in by a practical joke. The lights were real but the web-cam and web-based control were a hoax that’s now getting a bit of press attention. What’s interesting, though, is that from the details it sounds like the hoax was more technically complicated than actually setting up a system to really do what he claimed it would do. Still, it’s somewhat amazing that no one figured it out until now.

Originally from Techdirt

There are plenty of stories going around from this past weekend about the astounding number of flights canceled due to computer and staffing problems. While US Air got plenty of headlines for their staffing issues (baggage handlers calling in sick at record rates leading to planes that were simply filled with excess lost baggage), the more interesting story appears to be Delta’s subsidiary Comair. Lots of articles are talking about the 1,100 flights on Christmas day due to their computer system getting knocked out, but there’s very little info on the actual cause of the problem. There’s just the fact that no one can explain why there was no backup system, and that the computer crash was caused by the system being overwhelmed after weather problems required many flights to be canceled and crew to be reassigned. In other words, a lot of users were trying to figure out how to reassign flight crews to different flights, and all that activity made the system lie down and go to sleep. You would think that anyone building systems this important would have backups in place and build things in a way that would make them unlikely to crash, but this is hardly the first time things of this nature have happened.

Originally from Techdirt