Some years back, President George W. Bush was quoted as saying, “Are the highways of the internet becoming more few?” Despite his seemingly nonsensical quote, George W. may have been onto something, sort of. According to a new report, commuters on the Information Superhighway could be facing serious traffic jams by 2010.

The reason? Too much data traffic, not enough capacity, and not enough added capacity to keep pace with growth. Hmm, sounds like the freeways here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

One example given is YouTube, which was generating 27 petabytes worth of traffic per month as of mid 2007. To put that in perspective, 1 petabyte is 1,024 terabytes, or over 1 million gigabytes. Most desktop computers sold today have hard drives in the range of 250-500 Gigabytes, and only higher-end desktops are pushing into the terabyte range. So yeah, that’s a lot of traffic generated by a single site. Just to think, three years ago nobody even heard of YouTube.

What does this mean for you? If these predictions come to pass, without a major increase in capacity, you can expect to spend more time waiting for your Myspace profile to load. That means, of course, there is a greater chance of your boss catching you on Myspace. Now get back to work!

So enjoy your nice speedy connection while you can before it feels as sluggish as dialup, and go download some absurdly huge file!

If you want to read the whole report, you can (caution:…
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All righty, it’s been a while since we’ve done a hardware comparison here.

Lately it seems that all-in-one desktop computers have seen their popularity rise. Since August, Apple has released a fairly large update to the iMac, Gateway unveiled their Gateway One PC (which is way sexier than the Profile 6), and the Dell XPS One.

In this article, I will compare one configuration of the Apple iMac, Dell XPS One, and Gateway One. And if you think you’ve seen this sort of article around here before, well, you’d be right.

First thing’s first

Before I start, I want to get a couple things out of the way. First of all, I am not framing this article to make one company look better or worse, so let’s not even go down that road. These prices are for models as configured on Sunday, November 18, 2007, and are what the manufacturers list on their US online stores (Dell/Gateway Home and Home Office and Apple’s standard pricing). All prices are in US Dollars.

Secondly, yes, I know you can buy a regular tower PC for less than you can buy an all-in-one. Yes, I know you can build a PC for less. Please don’t leave a comment telling me this. In general, all-in-ones are presented as mid-range to higher-end consumer desktops.

A method to this madness

For this little experiment, I set out with some basic specs in mind:

• At least a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 320 GB…
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Dell. They’ve always had the reputation for churning out decent PCs at good prices. But let’s face it, their products have never seen incredibly unique. That may be changing, though.

Yesterday Dell too the wraps off their XPS One all-in-one desktop, and their very first tablet PC called the Latitude XT. Dell hasn’t said much about the XPS One yet, but there is a teaser page up on Dell’s site. The XPS One is the latest all-in-one desktop to come from PC makers; other recent releases include the Gateway One (yes, I know about the name--coincidence?) the HP Touchsmart, and of course, the iMac. Perhaps PC companies are noticing that there is a market for the all-in-one desktop?

The Latitude XT is the first tablet PC out of Dell, and it’s not an ordinary tablet PC. As Engadget reports, The Latitude XT sports a multi-touch display. Dell used a painting program and photo viewer demo app to show off the XT’s multi-touch capabilities. The big question: how will Windows and applications handle multi-touch input? That remains to be seen. Still, it’s nice to see some really exciting products come from Dell.

UPDATE: The XPS One is now available to buy on dell.com Models start at $1499 for a 20” display, 2 GB of RAM, and a 250 GB hard drive.

A group of hackers have released a web-based application that JailBreaks iPhones and iPod Touch devices running software version 1.1.1. The application also installs Installer.app. From TUAW:

To use it, open Safari and point your browser to jailbreakme.com (which we aren’t linking to so folks won’t install this by accident, but you are prompted to confirm). Once there, read the directions, scroll to the bottom, and tap Install AppSnapp. If Safari disappears and you return to the main Home screen, you’re good. Just wait a minute more for your unit to restart--don’t touch anything until you see the slide to unlock screen. If Safari hangs, just quit out (press and hold Home for 4-8 seconds) and try again.

Once you get to slide-to-unlock, go ahead and unlock your iPhone or iPod touch. You’ll return to your home screen which will contain a new Installer.app icon.

The application is based on a recently-released exploit for 1.1.1 which used a vulnerability in the open-source libtiff library found on the iPhone.

The announcement this morning was as low-key as it was stunning. An innocuous posting on Apple’s Hot News page, signed by “Steve” read:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users.

And just like that, one of the biggest criticisms against the iPhone disappeared. Just like that, the iPhone (and to a lesser extent, the iPod touch) has gone from being a pretty but ultimately limited gadget to an extremely exciting handheld computing device. Already blogs are brimming with wishlists for applications on the iPhone, and Mac developers everywhere are salivating over the prospect of finally being able to reach a mass-market audience with their apps.

But (and you knew it was coming...) My main worry lies in this paragraph of Steve’s announcement:

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from…
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