Minor WWDC Revelations

Today was a rather fruitful day of work, except that I still have a ton to get done tomorrow. I missed the live feed of WWDC though due to a lunch, but, as I suspected from the lack of intense pre-WWDC buzz, very little was revealed in Jobs' keynote. I thought, at the least, that he'd release some Core 2 Duo machines, but no dice! So what did Steve Well, as you'd expect from a developers' conference, a lot of stuff for developers! If you really want to see all of it, Apple has it on their site. Apple has released a new Mac called the Mac Pro, with a price tag of $2,500, in the stead of PowerMacs. Sound expensive? Actually, I thought it was pretty good for two Core 2 Dual Cores under the hood, a 250 GB hard drive, and 2 GB of RAM with a 667 Mhz FSB. That's a pretty nice package if you're trying to run a server, but obviously not for the average consumer. Pretty much the rest of the presentation was vested in Mac OS X Leopard after he took a couple of dumb jabs at Microsoft and Vista, and he was really harping on a feature called Time Machine that essentially backs up your hard drive quite regularly and lets you choose files to restore from past points and such. That's no stealing from other backup software or Windows System Restore at all, and another feature called Spaces that allows you to separate your applications into various desktops, which is little more than desktop switching from Linux on steroids. If they're going to be critical of Vista for stealing features, how about reversing the finger pointing? The upgrades to Mail and iChat are nice though, and I really liked the idea of Dashcode to ease the process of creating widgets for Dashboard. Other than those things, not much to get excited about from Steve's keynote. I guess they're not ready to pull out the big guns quite yet! Developers will get their early build of Leopard within another week, but I think it's unfortunate that we don't have all that much to get excited about in Leopard. What's the rush? Why not hold out a little longer and up the ante on virtualization?

It's the Web's birthday today! Tim Berners-Lee first released his WWW project to the public 15 years ago this very day. It really doesn't seem like that long, does it? Google is testing out a new UI for Google Video, and it's definitely a step up from what they currently use. However, it's similarities to YouTube are uncanny. Could they really not come up with anything else? Microsoft's invitation to hackers to break Vista has turned up one researcher's "blue pill" software that bypass checks for malicious code when in the administrator mode, which is still pretty dangerous since I'm sure many users will be working out of administrator mode. What's a bigger deal is that Paul Thurrott has pointed out for us that IE 7 will not follow some of the more important web standards simple because IE has been non-compliant for so long that it would cause IE 6 compliant sites to get screwed over. This sounds pretty alarming to me and I recommend following his advice, don't upgrade to IE 7 or just don't use it. Sites can see what browsers view their site (thankfully, over 45% of my readers use Firefox because they rock) and if IE sinks then more people will follow web standards so that everyone's life can be easier. Lastly, I know I've mentioned Quikmaps before, but there's another map site called WikiMapia that allows you to quickly e-mail/post maps, except that places are tagged on it by the community to mark important landmarks and buildings.

Things are looking good for the production of a Speed Racer movie with the Wachowski Brothers establishing offices for the movie in Burbank, and I'm really curious to see what they do with this one. Regardless, I'm really starting to get tired of seeing remakes of old TV shows. What happened to originality? AICN's Capone got a good look at The OH in Ohio, and it sounded like he enjoyed it but that it doesn't imply that the movie was good. That saddens me a bit because I was wondering if that movie would be a sleeper hit that pushes the issue of the modern-day concept of sex, but it sounds like it may fall short of that. Weinstein Co has decided to produce a direct-to-video animated remake of The Nutty Professor with Jerry Lewis handling a couple of the voices, and I'm not sure that the Weinstein brothers have made a DTV before so I'm curious to see why this movie should warrant that treatment. Will Ferrell has signed on to do yet another movie called Semi-Pro, apparently centering around 70s style baskketball (all I can think of with that setting is the Harlem Globetrotters). I wonder when he'll start being in a new movie literally every few months? George C Romero is going to try to make another comeback by way of adapting a Japanese short story called Black Isle, and I hope he gets it right this time! He needs to prove to this generation that he's still the master of horror. Lastly, JoBlo picked up the new trailer for Infamous, another biopic on Truman Capote, and it has a great cast but the trailer doesn't make it look nearly as good as Capote, in my opinion (though I still need to see the latter myself).

Now for some Monday Madness:

1. Are you working on any big projects around your house right now?
Nope, not really. Then again, I don't actually own a house =P
2. If so, tell us about it; if not, do you have any plans to do so in the near future?
Not quite yet!
3. How do you generally pay for merchandise at your local store? Debit, credit, check, or cash?
Credit card. It's just so convenient and I never spend more than I have, so being in debt isn't an issue with me. I can't imagine being in serious debt (except for like a loan, of course).
4. Which month of the year seems to go by the fastest?
Hard to tell, but probably August since it's so close to school starting again!
5. Which day of the week seems to go by the fastest?
Fridays, always!
6. Have you taken up any new hobbies lately?
Not really, but I have been getting more and more excited about web development.