iHam - The strangest Apple spoof I have ever seen.
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Failing silently is bad - gnegg - If your database has a choice between storing incorrect data or throwing an error, I’ll vote for throwing an error every time.
Tags: mysql postgresql
So Apple has announced that the iPhone will be getting an SDK in February. There’s not direct link to the news so if you haven’t read it yet (where have you been?) check http://www.apple.com/hotnews/ and look around.
There are still lots of unanswered questions though. John Gruber goes over some of the remaining questions. It seems clear that Apple will still want to control what apps your are allowed to install on your iPhone and will void your warranty if you try to do an end run around their system.
I haven’t bought an iPhone yet, but that seems like it is only a matter of time. My 2 year contract with Verizon ends in March, which would make switching less painful.
Wondering how Steve Jobs feels about the DRM they are required to include in music from the iTunes Music Store? Wonder no longer: Thoughts on Music by Steve Jobs. There’s some great stuff in there (emphasis mine):
Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. Its hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.
This could be a very big day for the future on online distribution of music. Here’s hoping that Steve is able to pull this off, I’d love to have DRM free music available from the iTunes Music Store.
Google Mac Engineering Manager Amit Singh announced a port of FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) to Mac OS X: MacFUSE.
It would be really great if Apple would integrate into this OS X. It has a BSD license so that shouldn’t prevent them from using it. Making it work with the Finder would be helpful though.
So John Gruber (Daring Fireball) takes on the TechCrunch spin of Zune by describing it as High on Vapor Fumes. The point being mostly that until the device is actually out, ranting about how successful it will be is premature at best.
John ends his post with a few questions:
If they’re “not done with it yetâ€, on September 14, when will they be? How late can they wait to go into production and still hit shelves for the holiday season?
And if this really is a killer feature in a product they honestly expect to ship within the next month or two, why are they talking about it now? Why tip their hand to Apple in advance? Why blow all this media attention before people can actually fork over their money for the thing? Why not go for maximum impact with a “Here it is and you can buy one today!†debut a few weeks from now?
And the most important question of all: Brown?
When will they be done? Who knows. How late can they get it in to production to make into the holidays? I don’t know that one either, but it may not be that important. The telling question to me is asking that if this is so great, why talk about it now, possibly giving your competition ideas and time. Very simple, getting it into the minds of the consumer. If people believe that Zune will be many times better than the iPod, they’ll put off buying a brand new iPod of the holidays and wait for the new Zune device. Think of it as a battle for hearts and minds.
Microsoft may even realize that they aren’t going to make this holiday season at all and are doing this in a attempt to do nothing more than dampen iPod sales. That scores a little too high on the over the top conspiracy meter for me, but then again Microsoft if known for releasing products late.
As for the brown thing, no idea.
Yesterday was a bummer. The hard drive on 15″ PowerBook G4 died. Thankfully the folks at the Apple Store at Arden Fair Mall replaced it quickly, after I spent the $99 for Pro Care. I dropped it off yesterday afternoon and it was ready first thing this morning. It was still under the three year warranty so the repair didn’t cost anything.
After I got back to the office this morning I noticed that the system only showed 1 Gig of RAM instead of the 2 that I had before. Back to the Apple Store. Both of the memory sticks were still in the system, but it would only recognize one slot. Looks like the logic board is going to need replacing. To see if I could get things done any faster I went to the CSU Sacramento Computer Store where they have an Apple tech on site. He seemed to think that it was just one of the memory chips that was bad. So we pulled the bad one with then intent that it would get replaced next week (there was a life time warranty on the memory).
Back to the office one more time. The system would work for a few minutes and then freeze. Then it wouldn’t boot. Then it paniced while booting. Ug, not good. So then I moved the one remaining memory stick from the slot it was in into the other other slot (there are only two slots). After that it has been fine. Looks like the Apple store folks were right, the logic board needs to be replaced. Ick.
I’m bummed to spend so much of the day running around trying to get my two year old PowerBook G4 going again. While I still do a lot of (I mean a lot) of Windows work, not having Unix like guts on my primary development system is a real pain. Of course if things got bad enough perhaps work would spring for a new MacBook Pro :-)
Hey, I can dream.
Apple announced a public beta of Boot Camp, which helps you install Windows XP on your Intel based Apple hardware. This includes drivers for graphics, networking, audio, wireless and bluetooth.
I’ve got to get this out of my system first: This Is So Freaking Cool! Okay, I feel better now.
With Boot Camp you can dual boot between Windows XP and Mac OS X. Details are still coming out, but I’m going to guess that this contains updates to EFI to support BIOS dependent operating systems. If that is the case then you should be able to multi-boot between other operating systems also (like FreeBSD or Ubuntu). Perhaps even Windows Vista when it is released. If you combined this with something like Mac Drive 6, which allows Windows to read/write to HFS/HFS+ (the Mac OS X file system), you’ll have a pretty reasonable setup.
Boot Camp will be included in the next version of Mac OS X (10.5) Leopard. I don’t believe that a release date has been talked about yet for Leopard, but we are supposed to hear more this summer (August). This also brings into question the rumors about virtualisation software being included in Leopard. How far with Apple really go with allowing/supporting other operating systems on their hardware? As much as I’d like to see this rumor be true, part of me things that it isn’t likely that Apple as a company would be thrilled with the idea. They have to draw the line some where on encouraging people to use non-OS X software.
At this point I see Boot Camp as good news for Apple and consumers. For die hard Apple fans this won’t change anything, but it makes for one more reason for Windows users to make their next computer a Mac instead of a traditional PC.
Om comments on Apple’s storage sales of the Xserve RAID unit. Although sales of the unit seem to be do well, especially considering that this was a market that Apple has zero presence in only a few years ago, many analysts are frowning on Apple for not doing enough to promote these.
We’ve got a couple of Xserve RAID units at work (one with an Xserve G5, the other plugged in to two Dell 2850s) and I’m definitely a fan. Right now you can order up an Xserve RAID with all of the options for under $18,000. This is simply amazing for 7TB in a RAID box. Sure you could go buy 14 500GB drives from NewEgg for less than $5,000, but what would you put them :-)
I think Apple is still trying to figure out how to market their server and storage products. I guess the folks like me who see these things and start to drool aren’t as common as the folks itching to buy the consumer level product. More than once I’ve gone into an Apple store and told them they need to be showing off their server and storage products, not just the home systems. My requests obviously haven’t had any impact.
I was driving home the other day and a song popped in to my head out of nowhere. After replaying it a few times in my head I realized that this would make the perfect theme song for Apple’s switch to using Intel CPUs. So what song am I thinking of? None other than “Weird Al” Yankovic’s geek inspired tune:
If you are having a hard time remembering how this song goes check out the sample on the Amazon.com: Running With Scissors page.
…
While your computer’s crashin’, mine’s multitaskin’
It does all my work without me even askin’
Got a flat-screen monitor forty inches wide wide
I believe that your says “Etch-A-Sketch” on the side
In a 32-bit world, you’re a 2-bit user
You’ve got your own newsgroup, “alt.total-loser”
…
It’s all about the Pentiums, baby!
…
This afternoon we were at Arden Fair Mall to pick up a couple of thing and I stopped by the Apple Store in the mall to see if they had any of the new MacBook Pros out to play with. They didn’t have any so I didn’t stay there very long. As we continued to another part of the mall we passed a group of three teenagers, one of whom was asking the others if they had seen the “cool iPod store on the second floor”. I realized immediately that he was talking about the Apple store. Although the Apple stores certainly carry other items besides iPod, that was obviously what he was most interested in. I guess this shouldn’t really come as a surprise given the iPod sales figures that Steve Jobs shared during his keynote last week.
Perhaps Apple should start opening smaller versions of the stores and put a big sign up front: “The iPod Store”.
Once again the faithful gathered to listen to Steve give the keynote address at MacWorld. The Apple Store is backup now, so you can check out the prices and specs for new items and updates.
Perhaps the most anticipated news was the move to Intel CPUs. Lots of speculation was going on about which systems would be the first to make use of these CPUs and would they be announced today. Two Apple systems are now available with Intel CPUs: an updated iMac and the new MacBook Pro. Both of these system sport the new Intel Core Duo, which by the way has to be one of the worst product names to come out of Intel.
The notebook line certainly was in need of an update, the MacBook Pro has a built in iSight camera and a much needed graphics card update to an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. One thing that was removed from the new notebook was the Firewire 800 connector. They still have a Firewire 400 jack, but that point you may as well use USB 2.0. The lack of a Firewire 800 port is real bummer, but not likely to be a deal breaker for most folks.
A fully loaded MacBook Pro will set you back about $3,350. That is with 2gig of RAM, a 7200 RPM 100gig hard drive, iWork 06 and the Apple Care Protection Program (ups the warranty to 3 years). When combined with the standard specs this seems like a well priced system. Because they are using recently announced CPUs we’ll have to wait until other vendors start shipping updated products to get a reasonable comparison. Until then I expect to see reports of people attempting to install Microsoft Windows as soon as the new MacBook Pros start shipping. I would very much like to see these things dual boot between Windows and Mac OS X without having to jump through too many hoops.
The Mac OS X shipping on these sytems is apparently all native for the Intel CPUs, down to the bundled applications. A new version, 10.4.4, is supposed to be available today, but I haven’t seen it show up in the Software Updates yet.
UPDATE 1:45pm 10 Jan 2006: Apple now has the keynote address on their website.
In the last month or so there has been lots of discussion about running the x86 version of Mac OS X on non-Apple x86 systems. www.osx86project.org has lots of information, with plenty of resources on their wiki. I’ve read some of the articles on how to make this work and watched some of the videos that demo a working install, but I never really got into it too much beyond that.
A friend of mine was a bit more determined though. The first time he installed it he was using the VMWare image and all the limitations and hoops you have to jump through to make that work. Later on he discovered that some folks had bundled together the needed SSE2 hacks and drivers into a DVD image with the OS X for Intel. He burned the DVD and has tried out the install on a few systems, all of them seem to work in various degrees. Most of the problems seem to be with driver support for video, network and audio systems. But the install is for the most part a standard OS X install, with a few customization options for installing SSE2 or SSE3 hacks and drivers. I witnessed an entire install of OS X on an older Dell system running a P4 1.8Ghz CPU (with SSE2) and 512 MB RAM. The install went fine, audio and network both worked and the video works okay, but only supports 1024×768.
The applications seemed to work fine also. Safari, Quicktime, Dashboard, iPhoto, iTunes and Preview all started up and appeared to run just fine. Downloaded SubEthaEdit version 2.2, which is a universal binary, and it ran without complaint. Even the PPC version of FireFox 1.0.6 runs on it. Speed wise it seemed comparable to my PowerBook G4 with 1.25Ghz CPU and 2 GB RAM. I’d imagine that on a high end Intel system OS X would run very nicely. I can’t tell how strange that sounds :-) Even stranger is the prospect of using Darwine to run Windows apps on Mac OS X.
So now I’m excited to see Apple hardware with Intel CPUs. I’d love to get a new PowerBook that I could split up 4 ways: Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD and FAT32 to share across the three operating systems. Of course I also want it to have great battery life. I don’t want to wait until next year (or longer), I want cool new toys from Apple now!
First Apple announces that they are moving to Intel x86 CPUs and today they’ve announced a multi-button mouse to be called the Mighty Mouse.
What’s funny about all this is that this will undoubtedly be the subject of conversation, blogs (I’m guilty of it right now!), and pundits for the next week or so. All over a mouse. Only Apple could make such a huge splash by releasing a mouse. It’s a mouse people! Will announcing a new mouse make a difference to Apple’s stock? That would be really funny.
This leads to the next obvious question, will Apple now incorporate multi-button mice into their new (x86 perhaps) laptops?
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
UPDATE 2 Aug 2005 2:15pm: Checkout Russell’s hands on review.
If you’ve read Scobleizer you know he works for and pushes Microsoft pretty much every chance he gets. Recently he’s been on a kick talking about buzz around the web, citing things like the announcement of Google Moon recently. He also compared Microsoft and Apple in blog buzz and a few wider market counts. His reference to Howard Dean seems on when it comes to blog buzz, it doesn’t necessarily correlate to popularity in the general population. Despite that Scoble still seems to have a touch jealousy about not getting more blog love buzz for Microsoft.
So today he tried to go on the offensive by responding to a MacDailyNews post. Scoble managed to not learn his own lesson here, and most folks will likely call him on it. First off the MacDailyNews article is nothing but name calling (think 2nd grade here), even those who use Apple products (of which I am one) recognize this and quickly move on or completely ignore in the first place. He would have been much better if he’d just left this alone or focused purely on features, not trying to return fire.
But since he did lets take a look at his response:
The constant theme here is that none of the issues that he brought up has to do with operating systems, specifically Mac OS X Tiger and Windows Vista (or XP for that matter). No where does Scoble actually address the issue of feature comparison between two operation systems. He completely dodged the question entirely, perhaps he should go into politics?
Scoble will likely see his post succeed on one point though, it will probably generate some blog buzz in response. Unfortunately I suspect that most of it will be negative.
Just to be clear, I deal with Windows (2000, XP and 2003), Mac OS X (10.3 and 10.4) and FreeBSD (4.x and 5.x) systems on pretty much a daily basis. Each has strong and weak points and I generally try to do my best to only use each one where their strong points shine and avoid each one where their weak points are most exposed.
UPDATE 23 Jul 2005 1:15pm: After seeing his initial response, I have to wonder if this goal was just to get people talking about Microsoft and Windows. What is that saying about and publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell your name right?
Seems the development Intel/Mac systems from Apple are starting to make the rounds. The folks at Think Secret have some initial details on the hardware. The only problem they seem to have run into with running Windows XP on it was with the video card. Running Intel/OS X on a non-Apple/Intel system didn’t work though.
The ability to dual boot an Apple system between Mac OS X & Window XP might be an attractive option. Perhaps a three hard drive solution would work best: 1 for OS X (Mac OS Extended file system), 1 for Windows XP (NTFS) and 1 for shared data between the two (FAT32 file system). I wonder if a shared iTunes directory on the shared data drive would work with iTunes on both Windows XP and OS X?