SFist Tech Roundup: Tumbleweeds
Howdy, folks! It's been a powerful slow week for tech news, so in honor of the Fry's in Palo Alto, we'll take the "roundup" in the title literally and rustle us up a big heapin' mess of western-themed blog headlines! Hot and saucy! Texas style!
Frontier Justice in the Lawless Blogosphere
Seems a week don't go by less we hear about Google, and this time they're under the gun from Webmasters gettin' hit by blog spam. Bloggers and search engine/indexing service maintainers are accusing Google of not putting enough safety checks into its Blogspot service, making it too easy for spammers to create fake blogs that get linked in with the "real" ones.
We in the labs can't be too critical of Blogspot, as we'd hate to see some heartless computer prevent some narcissistic Web user with erectile dysfunction and a fascination with cheap prescription medication from realizing his opportunity for free expression.
By SFist Chuck, contributing
Draw!
Word from SFGate is that Apple is takin' aim at Adobe and Photoshop with their new Aperture software. It's targeted at professional photographers, and Apple is highlighting its ability to work directly with RAW images from digital cameras, instead of having to convert them to lossy formats.
Heart of Gold
Other announcements from Apple were new PowerBook and Power Mac models. The notebooks have higher resolution screens and longer battery life, but no processor increase. The processor increase came to the Power Mac line. It'll come in a Power Mac G5 and Power Mac G5 Quad, the latter having two dual-core processors. Other upgrades to Power Macs include PCI Express architecture expansion slots, and NVidia Quadro FX graphics cards to stick in them.
MacWorld explains the benefits of dual-core processors and how they'll likely be kept in the design once Apple switches to Intel processors next year.
This Town Ain't Big Enough For the 26 Of Us
SFGate also ran an update on the companies submitting proposals for free Wi-Fi Internet access in San Francisco. The city received 26 proposals and "are expected to make their recommendations to Newsom at the end of the month."
Injuns!
Cisco Systems is making a 1.1 billion dollar investment in networking in India, according to news.com. SFist Tech applauds Cisco, Microsoft, Nokia, and Motorola for meeting the demand for telecommunications technology in India, and we look forward to the day when Indians are calling help centers in the US of A for technical support.