So, the big weapon that Apple was highly touting are indeed the new iMacs. Previous low end models were in the price range of $1000, but the new price range of iMacs will start at $1300 USD and goes up to $1800 USD. The specs:

700 MHz G4, 128MB RAM, 40GB drive, CD-RW - $1,299 (available March)

700 MHz G4, 256MB RAM, 40GB drive, DVD/CD-RW - $1,499 (available February)

800 MHz G4, 256MB RAM, 60GB drive, SuperDrive (DVD burn) - $1,799 (available January)

All iMacs will feature a GeForce2MX graphics chipset and the two high-end models include Pro Speakers. To the dissapointment of lots of OSAlert readers (judging from our comment's section), the 15" LCD monitor only does 1024x768 (by design, good quality LCDs can deliver easily higher resolutions to this screen size - unlike CRTs which are more bound to the screen size). Get the latest info and detailed information from Steve Jobs' keynote at MacMinute and C|Net News. Our Take: This was over hyped all last week. ZDNews reported that Apple has not hyped anything in such a way ever, and they should have introduced something revolutionary. Apple should not have hyped these new products so much, as they are just a more modern & futuristic revision of an existing product. I am dissapointed in the way they tried to manipulate the crowd. Also, the entry level iMac has a ridiculously small amount of memory and no DVD playback. And it does not even meet my $1000 budget to buy the low-end machine Apple has to offer. I am dissapointed with Apple for more than one reason.

I'm writing this opinion piece on the eve of perhaps Apple's most hyped MacWorld Expo ever. TIME Canada has already pre-released an article about the next-generation flat-panel iMac machines, complete with pictures of the it, its industrial designer and Apple CEO Steve Jobs. While the complete picture has yet to be painted (and will be in the morning when Jobs reveals the specifications during his keynote speech), I'm starting to believe that Apple feels that "innovation" and "revolution" are a matter of hardware and user interface aesthetics. Where Apple used to pave the way for new technologies, programming methodologies and user interfaces, they remain stuck in a rut of their own creation, bound to re-create a lot of the same mistakes that caused them to lose the majority of their market share and relevance to Microsoft in the 1990's. E-I-C's note: The article was written before the actual MacWorld Keynote took place.

TimeCanada was "kind enough" (someone could say that they have screwed up, and they now link their index page to Time.com - but we know a few tricks of our own to link to the 'right page' which they try to hide) to write a story about Apple's new iMac, that is supposed to be revealed tomorrow during Steve Jobs' keynote speech at MacWorld SF. At this writing, the article is still up but hidden from the front page of TimeCanada, and the date on the article is January 14, 2002. If the article will be taken down, visit Slashdot for details and lots of comments. Our Take: I am personally very dissapointed, if this is indeed the "big secret" that Apple was keeping and was hyping enormously all week. Firstly, I was waiting for something else as the "secret weapon" than an iMac update (no matter if this update may be big), and as I read in the article, while it does not give any hardware specs except the fact that the new iMac will have DVD burning capabilities, the prices start at $1300 up to $1800 USD for the highest model, and that $1300 is $300 more than the previous low-end iMac model. I do not care about DVD burning (I only want playback) and even if the new iMac can do.. coffee, simply put, this is just too expensive for me, as I was expecting to buy a new G4-based iMac for $999 as I wrote recently. Plus, the new iMac looks like an egg (that's not necessarily bad though :). Update: Updated link and many pictures of the new iMac.

"Ruby. Perhaps you've heard of it? "Oh, yeah, I think it's one of those new object oriented scripting languages", you say. I know a lot of you might be thinking "Not another new language! I'm perfectly happy with (COBOL/C/cshell/awk/Perl/...); why does the world need another programming language?!", while a few others are thinking 'Cool, a new language to explore'." Read the rest of the article, an introduction to the Ruby programming language, at FreshMeat.

"So what is the deal with these Java guys? We get more than our fair share of personally-challenged individuals in this industry and many seem to hoard around some new mega-hype technology. Based on very little, these individuals crusade as to how this new way revolutionizes everything that came before. They ridicule anything that doesn't fit into their new model, mock the intelligence of anyone who disagrees and feel they can occupy the moral high ground. This is not an anti-Java article. Many of us have seen all this before, lived through it and even partaken in many of the crusades as the rally calls are made. Can the same be said of other engineering principles? Do bridge or airplane designers start a new crusade every few years, demanding all old bridges and aeroplanes were rubbish and should be pulled down and replaced with virtual bridges or virtual airplanes?" Read the rest of the editorial at Angrycoder.

"Ingo Molnar recently posted a patch to the Linux Kernel mailing list that, in his own words, is "a pretty radical rewrite of the Linux scheduler". He includes links to the patch for 2.5.2-pre6 and 2.4.17. The stated goals are to retain the good things from existing scheduler, fully O(1) scheduling, 'perfect' SMP scalability, better SMP affinity." Read the rest of the story, and the whole email Ingo sent to the mailing list, at KernelTrap.org. The article includes information regarding the gain in performance, new features etc that the new Kernel Scheduler brings. This is indeed great news for the Linux users, developers and performance hungry admins.

Sony, Toshiba and IBM have reached a basic agreement on jointly developing a new operating system to be released in 2005 for computers capable of high-speed Internet connections. The OS will allow personal computers and home appliances to exchange huge volumes of data, including the high-resolution graphics of a television screen, through a broadband connection.

"Microsoft will demonstrate on Monday a tablet-shaped device that will serve as a bridge between the TV, the PC and the company's .Net services, according to sources familiar with the plans. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will show off the device, known as Mira, during his eHome presentation Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The device is effectively a cross between a Pocket PC-based handheld computer and a TV remote control. Mira will be a wireless handheld device and contain a sizeable screen. In conjunction with a TV or a PC, Mira will deliver Internet content, serve as a portable game player in conjunction with Microsoft's Xbox video game console, and allow consumers to shop online, see program listings and perform other tasks." The story is at C|Net-News and the funny thing is that the demonstration will take place the time that Steve Jobs will be delivering his highly expected keynote at MacWorld on Monday and will be uncovering the new Apple "secret weapon". Is Microsoft trying to minimize the potential surprise Apple is preparing? Is Apple's secret weapon also a tablet Mac? We will know for sure on Monday.

"If KDE and GNOME are the Hatfield and McCoy of Open Source graphical desktop environments, then theKompany.com and Ximian are not exactly kissing cousins. But the philosophical beliefs of the two businesses are converging, and the community is settling down to a broader acceptance of commercial software. Assuming computer users choose their desktops before they choose their desktop applications, ostensibly theKompany's and Ximian's target markets are non-intersecting sets. But their business practices and philosophies on Open Source have been scrutinized, discussed and compared at length in public." Read the editorial at NewsForge.

XPwm is an X11 window manager and a desktop that emulates the behaviour of Windows XP. XPwm (which is an evolution of the W2Kwm, both written in Kylix) tries to be an "exact" copy of the Windows XP Interface (except the registered logos), including menu fading/dissolving and taking care of "every pixel" of each element. The author is looking for feedback and bug reports.

"Thanks to display technology, the world is going flat. No, it's not deflating, nor was Columbus wrong (or at least not entirely). It's our desktop displays that are getting flat-- buyers have decided that flatter is better, and flat-screen sales have gone through the roof. How did this happen, and what impact might these developments have on your future purchases?" Interesting article at ExtremeTech.

"developerWorks is pleased to announce the relaunch of the Linux zone's popular GNOMEnclature column. In this incarnation of the column, Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult of CodeFactory will give you the inside information you need to make the best use of the new GNOME 2 platform. In this series, you'll learn how to use the new and improved libraries available with GNOME 2 so that you can write your own Nautilus view, panel applets, and much more. In this article, Mikael and Richard reopen the series with a gentle introduction to GTK+ 2, the new foundation for the GNOME 2 desktop environment. By the end of this article, you'll have written and compiled a few sample GTK+ 2 programs and have a good understanding of GTK+ 2's many improvements over GTK+ 1." Detailed article, introducing the new features of GTK+ 2, such as double buffering (helps avoid flickering), full antializing, a powerful textview and more.

"Intel will debut the Northwood Pentium 4 chip with 2.0GHz and 2.2GHz models next week. With double the cache and DDR memory, PCs equipped with the smaller and faster new chips promise to give AMD a new level to surpass." Read the story at ZDNews.

Microsoft is trying to push the idea of the Tablet PC in the last few months but sources say that their product won't be ready for another year, while Apple may already have a tablet product already in the works. There are a lot of rumors flying around recently regarding next week's MacWorld, but these rumors are mostly about a possible iMac upgrade with an LCD display. Imagination among the Macintosh fans fly though, some even say that this is the reason (more illustrated/rendered screenshots 2, 3 and 4) as to why Apple writes to their web site "Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond.". Others, say that the "secret" device that Apple is hiding is actually called iWalk and it is a PDA. In any case, we will know for sure on Monday. Our Take: Personally, all I want to see (and buy) is a iMac G4 600 Mhz with a DVD/CD-RW combo drive and an ATi Radeon VE 32MB, all for $999 USD...