Say Hello to My Little Friend

Scarface is back in theatres for a short run.

###From Roger Ebert

The interesting thing is the way Tony Montana stays in the memory, taking on the dimensions of a real, tortured person. Most thrillers use interchangeable characters, and most gangster movies are more interested in action than personality, but “Scarface” is one of those special movies, like “The Godfather,” that is willing to take a flawed, evil man and allow him to be human. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Montana is played by Al Pacino, the same actor who played Michael Corleone.

I may just have to own this on DVD!!

Matresses Are Looking Pretty Good!

Windows will control 65% of all ATMs by 2005!

Within three years, most bank machines that dispense cash will run on the Windows operating system, according to a study published last week.

By 2005, 65 percent of bank ATMs (not including free-standing machines in places like convenience stores and casinos) in the United States will use a stripped-down version of Windows.

Yikes! Just what I want… a virus magnet to control my money!!

Can Return of the King Deliver?

On the special features of the DVD for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers(), several of the people involved with the project state that the third installment is by far the best of the three.

Given the near perfection of the first two installments, is it possible for the third to actually be that good?

Influential CTO Switches

Chad Dickerson is CTO of InfoWorld.

On a recent Friday, weary from shopping for a new PC, I grabbed the 3-year-old G4 at my desk (a 450MHz processor, same as my Dell) and took it home to see what all the Mac and OS X fuss was about. My plan was to add it to my existing home network, which consisted of two PCs and a Linux server. I plugged the Mac into the fourth port on my four-port KVM switch, mostly excited about iTunes. My Linux-served MP3 collection forced my unwitting experiment in enterprise Mac integration.

Fast forward to Monday and the KVM switch is in storage. I don’t need it because the Mac does everything I need. It replaced the Linux server and one of the PC clients, and I’ve mainlined the keyboard and mouse directly into the Mac. My experience with OS X at home felt like crossing a chasm.

Now maybe more people will take notice.

Apple Increases Market Share!

Apple increased its market share last year.

In both consumer and educational markets.

…Apple’s consumer market share climbed from 1.5 per cent in June 2001 to 3.5 per cent in June 2003, adding that Apple’s US education market share had also climbed, from 15 to 16 per cent.

Could this be the beginning of a comeback for Apple? Stay tuned.

The Greatest Compliment is Imitation

Mac users have long felt that Microsoft copies most of its best ideas from Apple. That opinion isn’t likely to change if Bill Gates’ sneak peek at a new computer and upcoming version of Windows is any indication of the future.

At last week’s Winhec computer hardware conference in New Orleans, Gates showed a prototype of an office computer called the Athens PC that Microsoft designed with Hewlett-Packard. It’s supposed to be a “futuristic prototype,” but the snow-white system looks familiar.

Futuristic, that is, except to a number of computer industry veterans who said that Microsoft and Hewlett were leaning too heavily on industrial design ideas that had originated with Apple

The story also notes that Apple executives “took obvious glee” last week in noting that the new graphics software that is scheduled to appear in “Longhorn,” Microsoft’s 2005 version of its Windows operating system, copies features that have been in Mac OS X since 2001.

“You don’t have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s vice president of marketing, is quoted as saying.

Maybe someday Bill will figure something original out on his own.