Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple’s history — and that’s saying a lot — the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: “iPhone,” the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it’d been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J’s eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch wide touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the sensor when it’s close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth with EDR, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quadband GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email.

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Xgl is an X server architecture, started by David Reveman, layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. Nowadays, most PCs are shipped with a 3D graphics card (foremostly from NVIDIA or ATI Technologies) and Xgl allows the X server to take advantage of its 3D processing power, assuming suitable drivers are available.

The results are absolutely staggering. See for yourself:

This story sounds pretty incredible but John makes some decent arguments. It’d be pretty tempting to buy one of those cool looking Macs and be able to play all the latest games on it. I’m not a huge fan of the Windows OS, nor have I ever used Mac OSX, but I do prefer the style of Apple‘s hardware over the usual Windows boxes.

Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP, and the stodgy Chinese makers.

A little bit of background: Earlier in 2005 I bought a wireless router so that I could use my laptop from work freely around the house. The same applied to my girlfriend’s laptop. Unfortunately, that wireless router fried and even though I can return it for a replacement (Linksys still has an RMA open for it – I just haven’t mailed it yet), we managed to do fine without. But it’s always been a thorn in my side. Why use cables when you can do it wireless?

For Christmas I got a wireless PCI card and the plan was to expand my Linux based router by adding on a wireless subnet. Unfortunately, I’ve spent the past 3 days trying to make it work. I’ve used different firewall distributions, such as Clarkconnect (my favourite), IPCop, and Smoothwall. While I could get the card to run in Clarkconnect using ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers, the configuration just would not take.

So I finally gave in and decided to resolve the problem with a Windows based solution. Yikes, that took me a long time to stoop to that level. In the end, everything works perfectly. I now have a Windows XP based router/firewall running Kerio WinRoute Firewall 6. It serves two subnets, my wired LAN and my wireless LAN which is secured with WEP encryption and locked down to MAC addresses. All this plus the ability to have content filtering, firewall based anti-virus capabilities, and more. I’m quite happy. Too bad it’s Windows though.

PS: I’m posting this from my couch.

In the booming world of online poker, anyone can win. Especially with an autoplaying robot ace in the hole. Are you in, human?

It’s late one Wednesday afternoon, and CptPokr is logged on to PartyPoker.com and ready to play. Onscreen, the captain exudes a certain brash charisma – broad shoulders, immaculate brown hair, restless animatronic eyes. He looks like he should be playing synth in Kraftwerk. Instead, he is seated at a virtual table with nine other avatars, wagering on limit Texas hold ‘em.

There’s plenty at stake. An estimated 1.8 million gamblers around the world ante up for online poker every month. Last year, poker sites raked in an estimated $1.4 billion, an amount expected to double in 2005.

Ever since the aptly named accountant Chris Moneymaker parlayed a $40 Internet tournament buy-in into a $2.5 million championship at the World Series of Poker in 2003, card shark wannabes have been chasing their fantasies onto the Net. Some even quit their day jobs and try to make a living at online poker. And why not? This shadowy world is driven by no less a force than the great American dream. As the tournament’s motto goes, “Anyone can win.” There’s one problem, though, as CptPokr is about to demonstrate: The rules of the game are different online.

CptPokr is a robot. Unlike the other icons at the table, there is no human placing his bets and playing his cards. He is controlled by WinHoldEm, the first commercially available autoplaying poker software. Seat him at the table and he will apply strategy gleaned from decades of research. While carbon-based players munch Ding Dongs, yawn, guzzle beer, reply to email, take phone calls, and chat on IM, CptPokr (a pseudonym) is running the numbers so it will know, statistically, when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.