I was really surprised to see the following bit of Javascript show up in the comments of a previous post, and waited awhile to see if it'd get picked up by anyone, but it didn't, so here we are. While I knew Apple knew about it internally for quite awhile, I hadn't yet seen it floating about in the wild -- and I wasn't at liberty to say anything as sometimes part of getting to know something is not being able to talk about it without making the life of the person who passed it on very difficult.
posted on April 12, 2006 at 12:25 PM
Hardcore Mac users are indeed a special breed, as shown by the dude's overt happiness to lay hands on a Powerbook. Relayed via Julian.
I read somewhere that acceptance is one of the key stages one has to go through before one is able to move forward, after denial, anger, and bargaining. An open question is whether the posted job description is indicative of the mental stage management is in, or whether someone is going to get called into their office for a chat. Caught by Roland C, thanks.
I don't normally post about software updates regarding various apps, because:
- There are better places to keep track of that type of thing, even if some of the options are arguably retarded (in a sling-blade way, not the cuddly way).
- You start doing it for one, then you have to start doing it for everyone.
It's worth mentioning Growl v.7.3 though, because:
- I said I would (like
xdays late, but still). - It primarily just fixes one bug -- but I gave Chris a lot of hell over this bug in person (not on the site), so good to note that it's fixed.
I've actually got a bit in my head regarding Growl, and other things, that's built up to the point where I want to dump it out...
Today is organization day, both in meat-space and on the computers. In particular, my Dock has gotten backed up with things I wanted handy, either because I was going to post them or wanted to pass them on...
Paul @ Rogue Amoeba, on realizing the supplier for MacWorld (GES) has a website that doesn't work in Safari and completely chokes FireFox:
Fantastic, no? It finally worked in IE (*shudder*), and even after I registered, I was unable to sign in using Safari. You'd think perhaps the company running a large portion of the biggest Macintosh show in the world would have a website that worked in Safari. You'd think.
The first screenshot had me in absolute stitches, only partially from having met him and being able to picture his expression when he saw it...
On December 9th I saw a document which intimated that Apple and the last defendant in the original "Tiger Torrent" lawsuit were close to reaching a settlement, which would be filed on December 13th. I sat on this so as not to cause any problems while it went through, however everything went through yesterday. With a little knowledge of the system and some cash you could view the court papers, but since they're public documents I'm posting them here:
There can be an out-of-sight-out-of-mind quality to a story like this, and if you're wondering what the deal is, an earlier entry lays most of it out, and links to the rest of the earlier posts and my earlier contact with David. With this settlement, it's my understanding that the Tiger Torrent lawsuits are now over, as there have been no other filings against any John Does...
I had the inbox down to 98 unreads, but the equilibrium point for it seems to be responding to 10 a day, which means it's backed up while I'm trying to figure out what Steve Jobs is doing in Playa de Oro, and whether it means Mac OS 10.6 will be code named jaguarundi or margay, along with how quickly the obvious more ghey moniker would follow the second.
While it isn't ideal, because there were amusing nuggets in some of those emails, we're going to do the paraphrased-questions thing again, because the inbox must get below 200 before I can try my hand at making sweet potato biscuits tomorrow. This time it's aggregating questions about two previous posts, the video iPod, and DRM...
The Evening at Adler video is available on its own suitably campy separate section as of right now, which is where you should be sending people. This was that little deal where some of the brightest indies in the Mac scene descended upon Chicago for a casual conversation on October 21st, 2005.
The video and the audio rip are available via a torrent and many generous web mirrors, although bittorrent is preferred, as is seeding -- it's not just for downloading Doctor Who anymore. As previously mentioned, it's being released under a Creative Commons license, because I want as many people as possible to be able to get to know these guys, and to be exposed to some of the ideas in it.
Take it, show it, snip it, post it, remix it, or just string together all the drunkenbatman space-cadet moments as a reminder of why sleep is important and its not socially acceptable to drink before noon. Above all, have a good time with it.
With that, I'm going to Disneyland.
I've long had warm feelings for IHOP, aka, the International House of Pancakes chain, as they...
So, I missed the last Apple Bug Friday, or maybe I missed the last two, as it's all kind of blurring together at the moment, but I'm reasonably sure I missed the last one. This was kind of disappointing, as earlier in the week I'd done some thinking about the lamest bugs in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.
For something to be considered The Lamest Tiger Bug™, it isn't enough for it to just be an obvious bug. It has to be a bug that so downright sickly sad that, like a dead canary in a coal mine, its state of being tells us something, somewhere, has gone horribly awry. This won't be exhaustive, but rather just what comes to mind...
Joachim writes:<--snipped-->
Anyway I just read an interview with another sony bigwig here and his talk of an OS for the PS3 was weird. Maybe I am wanting it too much, but do you see a collaboration with Sony and Apple for an OS? I mean the whole WWDC year of HD and the PS3 can do 1080p HD and that twice with dual monitor connections! Plus this would get them off the hook with IBM and put the hardware in Sony's hand just like the how they are putting the peripheral chips (north & south bridge) in Intels.
qutoes from the article that I like:
"Of course, the PS3 can run Linux. If Linux can run, so can Lindows. Other PC Operating Systems can run too, such as Windows and Tiger (Max OS X 10.4), if the publishers want [them] to do so. Maybe a new OS might come out.""The user interface will also get interesting. In the case of the PC, users will have to wait for years between XP's UI to Longhorn's. But the PS3's UI will evolve much faster."
<--snipped-->
Oh my, did Sony see you coming a mile away...
Awhile ago, I said the Mighty Mouse officially blows, and its caused some email. Damn, am I ever sick of this product, and I'm a step away from creating a rule funneling all mail mentioning it to a separate folder so I can only view them in a batch when I'm mentally prepared...
As it turns out, my embargo is generally worthless, because no one is paying it any heed. Earlier today, Rosyna passed on their new treat called Smart Crash Reports has reached Beta 5, along with some screenshots. "I'm embargo'd." I said, and then realized I was forwarding it onto twenty people I thought should know about it...
(Note: The download link on the front of the site isn't working, and most normal people -- Including the Unsanity Folks, are asleep. However, this direct link will work until non-vampires awake)
I wanted to throw up a short note about iTunes 5, even though it's pushing 4:30am and I'm having to add more wicks to the candle, because some have gotten the wrong impression about my post yesterday -- or rather are reading too much into it.
It's understandable, as its lacking some context, which is my fault, as I tried to do a quickie on something deserving a longy. Judging by my inbox people are annoyed at a lot of things about the iTunes 5 interface, while yesterday I was reveling in the glory that is Burnt Aqua Unified. I have to keep this somewhat short, because otherwise the embargo on the site in order to get things done for the site will be meaningless, but basically they have the right of it.
A lot of things going on here, which means the site is going to be quiet over the next few days while I try to squeeze a bunch of stuff in that just isn't getting done so the dreams of running up sand dunes will go away. Lots of cool stuff, it just kinda sucks one can't think of it and then have it happen without actual effort.
However, Apple wrapped up their "special media event", which means my inbox is getting humped by a bunch of excited readers, and one good humping deserves another...
About a week ago, I got turned onto the blog of a small pizzeria. Yes, a blog about nothing but pizza -- and it's just short of glorious. Topics include tips on how they do their dough, new vending machines hitting the market that will spit pizza at you while you're waiting for the bus, and of course photos of their wondrous creations.
Two things came to mind:
- These people are doing God's work.
- Alright, Apple. You ignored blogging while Microsoft was doing it, and then while Sun was doing it, but now you're getting shown up by a mom & pop pizzeria.
If you're not careful and wait too long, we could well end up with another one-button-forever fiasco, where you don't deign to participate for a decade or two because you came so late to the party and need to save face.
Belay the last post, as within a day, Apple has pulled their test drive promotion. Arstechnica is where I saw it, and will echo their words...
Cameron passed on that Apple is allowing people to take Mac Mini's home for a test drive with a 30 day guarantee...
I don't normally post rumors and tips, but lately they're starting to freak me out a little. A little while earlier, someone who will remain nameless passed on:
- The Apple wired mouse & keyboard combo was being EOL'd, to be replaced by a Mighty Mouse and keyboard combo.
- The build to order options of the Mac Mini were changing, no more wired mouse and keyboard, just the Mighty Mouse & keyboard and the Wireless Keyboard & Mouse combo.
I gave him my usual spiel, where I said I'd try to look into it but if I couldn't get any similar rumblings probably wouldn't run with it. I get all sorts of tips and rumbles, and lot of times they:
- Are accurate, but things change between what the person heard and what actually gets decided.
- Are conjecture based on something loosely heard somewhere else and the person wants it to be true.
- Are someone repeating someone else who wanted to be seen as In the Know™.
- Are wildly inaccurate, and is just Sircasua trying to mess with me.
Rarely are they really accurate if I haven't confirmed rumblings, but in this case a few minutes later while poking around in the Apple Store, the store changed. Looks real enough to me, and while you can't yet BTO the Mighty Mouse keyboard combo with any of their other Macs in the store, it would appear we're one step closer to Apple shipping a multi-button mouse by default.
This go around it's Digital Rights Management (DRM), whether or not Apple and Intel are cooking up a revolution, and a small redux on the PowerPC versus Intel brought about by a reader trying to juxtapose what they were being told yesterday versus what they're being told today.
We're still chewing through these, although the order is a little out of whack because I messed up how I was sorting them by their first-come-first-serve basis and the text file never seems to shrink.
Still, if you sent one we'll get to it eventually...
The other day I went a little nuts on Apple's new Mighty Mouse, because I figured one good splooge deserved another (No more emails about splooge -- count yourself lucky this wasn't titled "Oh, how the mighty have.." and be done), which included a lot of stuff, but my questions about the actual mouse itself boiled down to:
- How well the buttons work (Remember -- if these worked well, I was willing to give them major points)
- How well the trackball nub works. More specifically, whether you are constantly flicking your finger up and down or wagging it side to side.
- What the hell the tag to right on Apple's site meant -- My working theory was that the mouse might cost $.99+ per minute to use.
That very strange marketing blurb turned out to just be the normal mechanical click of the mouse
It's still a normal Apple on-button mouse you have to click down on, so there is that standard click, but there's some thingamajig to make small noises when you scroll or squeeze. Still, that leaves the buttons and the trackball...
I don't really advertise my IM names around anymore, but people have picked them up in various places anyways... and it isn't as though they're hard to guess. My impression is a lot of people will add me, and then lurk and watch my weird status messages (They're usually song lyrics, but I'm sure everyone thinks I'm close to reaching for a revolver).
All these people suddenly come out of the woodwork when Apple announces something, and I get to wake up and get a laugh because AdiumX has a gazillion tabs waiting for me that are all basically a "Did you see this?", followed by a link...
So yep, I saw it, but it was a busy day and I wanted to have a few drinks in me before I tackled it. I think Apple's Mighty Mouse is pretty cool, although I probably would have skipped dinner if I had known I was going to swallowing this much marketing splooge...
Someone sent me a link to a site called Inside Apple earlier today, which has an article up which is, I think, almost a parody of the last post:
It seems that in the past couple of months, I’ve read about and have personally seen more than a comfortable level of iMac G5’s hitting the dust a little sooner than originally expected. Surprisingly, even numerous second-generation iMac G5's have broken down short of their advertised life expectancy.
And on and on making points about the heat problems (And others, which yes, are very real) and then:
I may sound like I would never recommend the iMac G5 to friends or family. Not true. I find the iMac G5 to be a remarkable computer with its elegant design, along with the power of a PPC970 processor packed in behind its beautiful flat 17- or 20-inch liquid crystal display. Though I've seen many first-generation iMac G5's break down on numerous fronts, I haven't witnessed nearly as many second-generation iMac G5's break down on the same scale - and I'm confident - without any real facts to back it up - that of all the negativity I may witness in the iMac line of Apple products...
The guy wrote this a day or two before mine, but I hadn't seen it as The Drunken Eye of Sauron™ has been focused on other things and I'm not familiar with the site, but if I had I would have linked to it as an example because, um, what the hell.
Hey Drunken Bat Dude,Is something going on with you? I was reading through your last post, and I recognize some of the behaviors you pointed out in myself, but the drunk I know would not have made me feel stupid while making his point. Just my opinion, take it for what it's worth.
Mark F.
I actually got two emails like this, and after a little sleep and some coffee, and now looking over that last post, there is probably some truth to them and I should take my lumps. I was certainly a little more acerbic in what I'm banging out than I often am. I meant everything I said, but given a second shot I'd probably word some of it quite differently, as if I'm making people feel stupid I'm letting people down, including myself. In deference, I proffer these excuses:
- I'm stretched more than a little thin lately.
- A few of the things I'm working on have me frustrated to a level I rarely reach, yet I have to sit on quite a bit of it, and it wouldn't surprise me if stuff eeks out around the edges.
Let's just say I've become somewhat obsessed with the current quality of Mac OS X, and Apple hardware in general, but for right now am keeping it to the quality of what is going out on discs. I've been devoting a lot of resources into digging into what's going on, enough that I'm already backed up on the chats again. Not full-on Deconstructing Maui X-Stream obsessed, but it's getting close.
I think most real users know, in our heart of hearts, that Mac OS X has been misfiring quite a bit lately, and that 10.4 was almost a total misfire in terms of actually using it. It doesn't mean we're going to switch, it doesn't mean we've given up, it just means we know something is wrong.
You can like the idea of XHTML/JavaScript/CSS apps and still know Dashboard was a complete misfire, even if your only clue is that they're bolting on major functionality in a .2 release. You can like the idea of building webkit into your apps while knowing the quality of what you are building your app around isn't at the level it should be.
Severe, extreme wonkiness like this doesn't happen by accident, whether it is going on at Apple or Microsoft or anywhere between.
I was browsing the Ars Apple Blog this morning, which linked to a story saying this would be the last ADHOC (formerly MacHack) conference, which just finished up the other day:
At the end of this year's ADHOC Conference, Expotech announced that this was the last conference. Due to dropping attendance, higher expenses, and fewer sponsors, the show could no longer be sustained.The decline began in 2003 when Apple moved WWDC to the week following MacHack, which resulted in some last minute cancellations. In 2004 the name was changed to ADHOC in an attempt to attract a wider audience and the date was also changed to occur following WWDC. MacHack had its own culture and traditions, and was as much a social & networking event as an opportunity to learn & show off neat tricks.
I'm still sort of hoping this isn't really true, and still sort of hoping my feelers won't get back to me. Expotech, the company that's behind them, barely has a site to speak of, and there isn't anything on the PR page of Adhoc just yet.
Unfortunately, it has some of the ring of truth to it. Awhile ago all of the expos and exhibitions came under a grind, and when Apple started changing shows around it messed the Mac-specific ones up bad and they've never really recovered (Some would say there was more they could have done perhaps, but it's hard to put show like this together under ideal conditions).
Probably one of the better descriptions of ADHOC I've heard (or at least the most recent) was from Jonathan Rentzsch back in the Red Shed interview, where he said:
Adhoc is about one thing: coolness. It has four facets:
- Cool people
- Talking about cool stuff (papers/sessions)
- Showing off cool ideas (hacks)
- Coming up with your own cool ideas and trying to get them working (your hack(s))
That's it. It's very informal, most of it made up on the fly, by really smart people whom you can communicate with at very high bandwidth. Unlike WWDC, which is Apple's firehose, Adhoc is a distributed firehose about what your peers think is cool, not just what Apple thinks is cool.
Rentz also has a nice little introduction at his site that gives some more feel at the site (I'm kicking myself for forgetting to post it), and there are some other MacHack memories within that interview. If it's true, it's a really sad thing all around, as ADHOC was really a one-of-a-kind institution for Mac coders and the technically minded, and so many cool hacks and relationships would come out of that show every year.
There are hacker-conventions and such that take place elsewhere, but they don't really capture the charm and spirit that MacHack seemed to pull together every year. I tip my coffee to them, and if it turns out to be true, will be tipping a glass of something else to them tonight.
Every once in awhile, I'm just bored with what the hot topic de jour is at the moment. Judging by my inbox, and my constantly seeing it recycled via my feeds, right now the big buzz is about the rumored upcoming Apple Movie Store.
If you're fairly new to the site, you may be scratching your heads as it isn't as though I talk about the iPod all the time.
However, every once in awhile I do come down from the mountain carrying stone tablets, and I'd have to imagine that's why my inbox is a "Mac Movie Store and TiVO" clearing house right now. Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote C.K., and its Redux, which was an attempt to be a lazy kick in the head to a bunch of editorials and such I was seeing at the time.
It's hard to go back in the wayback machine and remember what was going on at the time, but it was all about Real Networks and their Harmony service, Apple opening their DRM, and the mythical iPod phone. Most of what was being said was so out of the bounds of reality, which can be confirmed that none of it has really been borne out.
Almost nothing has changed in my thinking since then, which is why I get bored with the iPod so easily, as everything I hear gets filtered through:
- Does it change the equation?
- Does it affirm the equation?
- Is it just more of the same until the end-sum of the equation?
If we skip back to the iTunes Music Store, the only real credible variable that's made my radar has been the addition of satellite radio to the mix, and podcasts, so we'll knock out Satellite Radio, Podcasts and the iTunes Movie Store in one swoop which will hopefully do us for another year...
I'm slowly but surely making it through the rest of the Pentium-switch questions that were sent in, and yes, I know this is taking forever but we'll get through them.
I basically threw them all into a .txt file separated by some line breaks (It's still about 24k in size), and just grab a few in between working on other things, so it's going to take awhile...
Do you think Apple will eventually move to AMD? They are by far more innovative than Intel, who is reacting to AMD and not leading the market. AMD is eating Intel's lunch! I could deal with moving from the PowerPC if they were using the best available, but Intel is the lowest denominator.
A lot of Mac users are really hung up on the Apple choosing Intel over AMD thing, but to really go into this we need a clearer picture of AMD's history in the microprocessor arena and their current role in the marketplace.
Right now, some of the antics you see going can and have really muddied the situation in enough people's heads that the way they view AMD is vastly different from the reality of their situation. Note I said clearer, as while AMD does have an interesting story, and we'll be going into some of the differences in their roadmaps and differences between their products and such, this isn't magnifying glass as this isn't titled 'Deconstructing AMD'.
One of the things I make myself do is browse through Apple's Knowledge Base articles, which isn't something I generally look forward to but it's good to keep up and one day there may be one with a fix for keeping audio in synch within iMovie.
Until that iMovie post, this new one is my current favorite and made me laugh tonight almost as hard as the little bit about "and other important acronyms" they had on one of their marketing pages awhile back.
Someone there deserves a pat on the back for eeking that through. Yay, swarm of bees!
Covering whether or now is the wrong time to buy a Mac, the possibility of dual-booting Windows and OS X on a Pentium-based Mac, plus more weirdness involving the CELL and consoles.
I was able to chew through a few more questions tonight. Endians (aka, one of the most boring subjects known to man), the coexistence of 32-bit and 64-bit, and cheap macs. It's approaching 4am now, so consider this post to come with zero warranty, but if something is off let me know and I'll check it out once I've slept and my functional IQ is back above 30.
I've been chewing my way through your x86 questions (there are a few pages of them), and as we learned in Under the Iron, ask me a question and you can kill an afternoon. Yes, it's that way in real life, too. So I'm going to break them up, in order of the ones that help kill off others.
For warning, I have a habit of lumping things together when it's just easier that way, so 'x86' will be used to denote the instruction sets that make up, well, x86 chips, and IA-32 and the 64-bit extensions added on will be broken out only when necessary.
Small problem regarding the last post: I'd thrown my cap over the wall regarding the WWDC keynote, which meant I had to climb over and get it, but in watching the keynote there isn't a whole lot to talk about outside of the PowerPC to Intel switch post I'm working on, but I did jot down some thoughts while I was watching.
I've been fairly glutted by notes from people attending (which all piled in late, as apparently the network at WWDC was offline constantly), so I almost didn't need to watch it. It also didn't help that I have an unwatched Doctor Who episode sitting around, but I'd thrown the cap over the wall.
Going by court documents filed a few days ago in the Northern District of California (which you can download below, since they are public record once you shell out a bit for them) it would appear Apple Computer and Vivek 'Sunny' Sambhara have reached a settlement agreement:
If you're new-ish to the situation, Sunny was one of three named individuals being sued for distributing a developer pre-release of Mac OS 10.4 over the internets, along with a score or so of 'John Does'. The site ended up sitting down with Sunny to get this side of what was going on, and eventually a whole bunch of notables from the Mac side of the fence weighed in with their varied thoughts on the situation.
It wasn't very pretty, and awhile afterwards Sunny was able to procure the services of Summers Rubinstein PC, who in a short Q&A explained why they were defending Sunny from Apple while forgoing their legal fees. The terms of the settlement are in the PDFs linked above, at least so far as I can tell. Just the fact that he'll be putting it behind him and focusing all of his attention on organic chemistry means it's a good day.
I know my shoulders loosened up a bit after seeing these papers, and while I do understand where Apple was coming from I can definitely say it's colored my view of Apple and their products. There's a bad aftertaste here, and I don't look at 10.4 the same way I may have otherwise. When they were factoring their return on investment on this course of action, I truly wish they'd been a little more creative.
While it is a great day for Sunny, and I'm whole heartedly glad they were able to work something out and put it behind them, I'd have to imagine that bad aftertaste outweighs whatever short term gains Apple procured (like 'sending a message') by a very wide margin.
I wanted to touch base a bit on what's been going on with Sunny (Desicanuk) over the last while.
To recap, Sunny is one of three named defendants (there are many John Does) Apple is suing for allegedly leaking a beta version of the upcoming Mac OS 10.4 onto the internet. A week ago it came out that one of the three named was able to settle with Apple, and move on to dealing with the criminal charges the lawsuit had created.
Because they've been blurred, it's worth noting that this is an entirely separate situation from Apple's legal actions against ThinkSecret, which is also a separate situation from Apple's legal actions against PowerPage and AppleInsider. I know, someone needs to start a Wiki.
I sat down for an interview with Sunny and the admin of the network where the Tiger beta was leaked, and then a bit later Apple Computer cofounder Steve Wozniak and more than a score of other notables in the Mac world weighed in with their thoughts on the issue.
A client of Summers Rubinstein PC -- a San Francisco law firm specializing in intellectual property and business litigation -- saw the interview and passed it on to someone at Summers Rubinstein, and a few weeks later Sunny officially had representation. The firm agreed to take it on pro bono, which is short for "pro bono publico", which means "for the public good", which basically means they've waived all their fees.
Last week I was able to touch base with Yano Rubinstein (Sunny's counsel) about a few things, and he agreed to answer some questions that I could post publicly, to both fill in some gaps and to keep you as in touch with what's going on as I could.
I saw in my feeds earlier that Tim Bray is thinking about switching away from the Mac, and gives some fairly decent reasons for why he's personally thinking about it. Repeat after me: "If I wouldn't flame someone for deciding, for their own reasons, that the Mac is the platform they want to use, then I wouldn't flame them for choosing otherwise."
I think he actually gives a pretty good overview of where the pros and cons are in his personal decision making process. And it is his personal decision making process. What's interesting is I know he's not alone -- but not saying he's the majority (but what wouldn't the majority of the Mac base be not-OK with?).
There are quite a few people in the community -- people you've probably heard of -- who are much less 'enthusiastic' about being a Mac user than they were say, a year ago. It's not generally any one thing, more of a few things converging on a bad taste in ones mouth, compounded by other options starting to open up depending on where your interests lie.
I'll admit I can identify with where he's coming from, as I've also been finding myself contemplating it in a pretty serious way. I've avoided posting about it for a few reasons:
So everyone and their mother is passing on that Apple settled with one of the three Tiger defendants:
"Apple Computer Inc. said on Wednesday it settled its lawsuit with one of three men it sued for distributing test copies of the next version of its Mac OS X operating system on a file-sharing Web site.While Apple will always protect its innovations, it is not our desire to send students to jail," said Apple spokesman Steve Dowling. "We are pleased that Mr. Steigerwald has taken responsibility for his actions and that we can put this lawsuit behind us."
He also said he is the subject of a criminal investigation by the U.S. Attorney's office and he is "working toward a resolution with the federal government.
Here's the rub -- most of you are asking things I can't help with, or rather won't. I can't and won't really say much about Doug, except to say that I'm glad for their sake they're able to put part of it behind them. He has a really fascinating story -- that I promised I wouldn't relate on here and won't -- but that one day I'd hope is able to be told.
...which I'm assuming you already heard while I was sleeping soundly and recovering from the last big post. C-Net has the best coverage of this, so it's worth just reading about it there where you can get links to the papers and such. The comments from the EFF are worth a read. Clip:
The judge said that Apple can go ahead and obtain records from Nfox, the e-mail service provider to Mac enthusiast site PowerPage.In the ruling, the judge largely brushed off the question of whether the publishers were journalists and therefore protected from facing contempt charges for refusing to divulge sources under California's shield law. "Defining what is a 'journalist' has become more complicated as the variety of media has expanded," he said. "But even if the movants are journalists, this is not the equivalent of a free pass."
The news on the Apple subpoenas got a little weird(er) today.
The last post had the New York Times saying that Apple had won -- yet the EFF's press release said no ruling had yet been issued. If you haven't yet read it, I'd check it out as it gives a mini-version of what went on in the court room.
I was a little confused by the conflicting data, so I asked an attorney at the EFF to clarify why so many news outlets were saying a ruling had been issued...
"Our press release correct, rumors of our demise were exaggerated."~ Kurt Opsahl, Staff Attorney for the EFF
Basically, they're still waiting on the decision which should come soon, and some people perhaps jumped the gun.
Update: Yep, the ruling has been delayed. It's looking pretty bad -- Apple's argument basically seems to be that only the websites they happen to give Press Passes to at MacWorld deserve traditional protections.
From the NYT:
Apple Computer Inc. can force three online publishers to disclose where they got confidential information about new Apple products, a judge tentatively ruled. Judge James Kleinberg of state court in San Jose, Calif., refused to shield the publishers from Apple's inquiries.Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that seeks to protect civil liberties related to technology, sought the order on behalf of the publishers. "We're disappointed that the tentative ruling was a denial," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer for the foundation. He said he would appeal the ruling.
iPodlounge has a story up on the iPod photo's new packaging, along with an, um, photo:
In releasing newly affordable iPod photo hardware, Apple Computer has changed the product's packaging to a thinner and highly attractive black and metal foiled design. Metal foil is used for the box's front text, while an all-black matte background highlights the metallic luster.The new packaging, which you can see more fully with the Read More button below, dramatically de-emphasizes the word "photo" on its front, reducing it to a tiny badge underneath the letters "PC." This contrasts markedly with Apple's new iPod mini packaging, which continues to grant the word "mini" equal prominence with the iPod name.
Back in 'This one goes to eleven', I gave a whole bunch of reasons for why I just didn't understand the iPod Photo, and among other things said...
Richard writes:
Congratulations... you made Canada's national newspaper! National Post had a piece on this item yesterday. It was almost a full page in the front section. They referenced DrunkenBlog and they included a picture of Steve Wozniak.
Well, that explains all the emails ending in 'Eh?' today. If you're a subscriber to the National Post you can view the article online, but it would be cool to view this in hardcopy and it would be even cooler for you to be able to see it as it's very well done.
I'd really like to know the story behind that post, when are you going to do your usual redux?
It seems what people are really after is not so much a redux but a post-mortem on how it came together and such. I can completely understand wanting that, and it's something I'll probably do, but the time isn't really right for that... mostly because this story isn't over and it's still in-progress as far as I'm concerned.
However, I'll try to get through some of the other questions. Where appropriate, they're paraphrased as usual to try to take out more birds with fewer stones...
Timothy says:
Woz and your site was featured on the screen savers. They had a phone interview with Woz. FYI :) It plays again at midnight EST, and tomorrow at noon. I didn't tape it, I don't have that kind of technology. They had nice web zooms and crops of your site tho. Do you get G4/TechTV?
Inbox is going off the hook about this one -- honestly bear with me I am trying to keep up -- but yep, it's true. I haven't seen the episode (yet -- feel free to send snaps), and I only had a short ping with him earlier today when passing on some information from a reporter.
From what he said earlier today to the reporter, and what I've heard about his call on the show, Woz basically reiterates why he's saying what he's saying regarding the lawsuits (and the repercussions) against Sunny.
It's been a little over a month since I sat down with Vivek "Sunny" Sambhara (desicanuk) for an interview on the lawsuit he was faced with, and what led up to it. This is a separate set of lawsuits from Apple's other ongoing cases.
A lot of feedback flowed in from that interview, most notably from Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer:
"I was shocked reading the interview. Everything fits into place that this is an unintentional oversight and the interviewed student appears to be one of the most honest people on this planet. I have to question who is most right in this case.I wish that Apple could find some way to drop the matter. In my opinion, more than appropriate punishment has already been dealt out. In this age of professional spammers and telemarketers making fortunes, we're misusing our energies to pursue these types of small time wrongdoers. I will personally donate $1,000 to the Canadian student's defense."
Sunny is one of three defendants who have been named in the suit, along with 25 other "John Does", for leaking a pre-release build of the upcoming Mac OS 10.4 onto the internet. It must be noted that this lawsuit is separate from what is being brought against ThinkSecret.
Things are looking pretty grim for Sunny. In order to deal with this, he'd need an attorney in, or licensed to practice law in, the state of California. They'd also need to be an expert in the field of intellectual property, and he's exhausted public avenues of help. Those are primarily geared towards helping a tenant deal with a landlord, with the expectation that the person is in-state. Nothing like this.
Those attorneys he's been able to to return his emails or calls have given a requirement of a $7,500 minimum retainer just to try to mitigate damages. Most required drastically higher retainer fees. This is a civil jury case in a Federal Court, which means there are no such things as public defenders.
There are things you need to do when you've been sued, like responses to the court. If you don't do them, the case defaults into a win for the other side and it all comes down to what they ask for in damages. You're at their mercy. Going by what they're asking for in the court papers, they aren't planning on being particularly merciful when it comes to damages.
Steve Wozniak is one voice in the Apple community, with his own frame of reference. To get a better snapshot of where the community stands on what Apple is doing here, I'm bringing you the words of 24 others from the Macintosh community, from 23 separate companies and projects.
I've specifically talked to developers because they also have large interests in intellectual property in one form or another, and they're a reasonable microcosm of the communities they represent.
Back in "Heading over the cliff while whistling", Carl said:
Following the general thread of these comments, I think we should make a wiki of some sort to list out and detail complaints about UI devolution. I could host it if there's interest and no one else wanted to do it, but I think it would be better if DB sponsored it...
This has actually crossed my mind before, and instigated one of the few times someone working at Apple actually went apeshit on me. This settled down once things were clarified, but the man wasn't happy.
Eweek has a story up where they dish that Apple has agreed to hold back their subpoenas of the websites, and their ISPs, etc. in their bid to find their leakers until the hearing petitioned by the EFF takes place:
Annalee Newitz, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told eWEEK.com that Apple, which is represented by the San Francisco law firm of O'Melveny and Myers LLP, has agreed to hold off on serving subpoenas until after the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, California, has held a hearing on the EFF's request for a protective order for its clients, two of the Web sites listed in Apple's suit. EFF filed the request this week; a date for the hearing has not yet been set, but it may be held in early March.
It's a pretty good article, breaking down why the EFF is involved and where they think Apple has gone wrong. Highly recommended.
Yesterday the EFF announced that they were asking the California Supreme Court for a protective order preventing Apple Computer from going after the individuals they've subpoenaed to hand over their sources regarding various product leaks:
Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a California Superior Court for a protective order that would prevent Apple Computer from forcing three online journalists to identify their confidential sources and hand over unpublished materials. EFF, serving as co-counsel for the journalists, argues that online journalists are protected by the same "reporter's privilege" laws that shield print journalists from having to reveal the names of anonymous sources.
I'd suggest you read the whole thing... but if you hadn't followed, various websites published information about a rumored product Apple was coming out with called "Asteroid", among other things, but it seems that "Asteroid" is what really set them off.
I've gotten a bunch of mail asking what's on my shoulder in an older post. It's a WaterField Cargo bag, and I'd highly recommend their kit.
I've used them for a long, long time, going back past three years. I just dig their stuff, even if there are some things that aren't quite perfect.
I'm reminded again on this early, early morning of just how much I loathe airports in general, especially the one I'm at now, and this PowerBook model.
Well, the campus does. Mac users are going to love this one:
"About 80 percent of Microsoft employees who have a portable music player have an iPod," said one source, a high-level manager who asked to remain anonymous. "It's pretty staggering."
The source estimated 80 percent of Microsoft employees have a music player -- that translates to 16,000 iPod users among the 25,000 who work at or near Microsoft's corporate campus. "This irks the management team no end," said the source. So popular is the iPod, executives are increasingly sending out memos frowning on its use.
I was going through Rory's blog the other day, where he has 'Apple's UI department going insane?' up for reading. He has some good points to make on where and how brushed metal is used, some great points on the Finder, and wraps up his points on the upcoming 10.4 with:
Come on Apple, at this rate Windows users might actually be pointing and laughing at us for how bad our UI looks by the time Longhorn ships sometime this decade.
The thing to keep in mind about Rory is that he's the maker of the excellent NewsMac software for OS X, and not long ago quit his day job to write code his heart out for the platform full time. He's not just a user with a couple of quibbles, he's a developer with an investment in Mac OS X.
I've written blurbs about this here and there throughout my posts, but the bottom line is that there's a huge elephant in the room when it comes to Mac OS X: The UI is going to hell in a hand basket and everyone is just averting their eyes.
When I was going over the speed bumped PowerBook models, I noted that an app existed called SideTrack that already gave you much of the same functionality (and more).
The author (Alex Harper, nice guy, who also makes the most excellent MenuMeters) has some really interesting thoughts regarding the introduction of the new PowerBooks. Whether it is a new driver or new hardware, whether he can offer the same 'two-fingered' scrolling and more are covered.
Apple updated the PowerBook G4's a few minutes ago, and here's the lowdown after a cursory glance...
There's an in-depth article over at C-Net on the booming industry of iPod accessories. It primarily focuses on the fact that out of all the iPods sold, 75% of them were sold in the past year, with 40% of them being sold in the last 3 months of 2004.
Because it's just a retro sort of week, and I hadn't seen these for ages, I figured I'd pass on a link of the uber-cool Apple Computer brochure Matt Groening (of The Simpsons) did for said Apple back in 1989. I sorta wish I wasn't linking to a .Mac server, as it's the sort of thing I'd hate to see disappear of the web.
The actual copy is pretty much verbatim of all their advertising towards students (and weirdly enough, corporate users) of the time, but Groening just gives it such charm. These cartoons predate The Simpsons, and are from waaaay back when he used to the 'Life in Hell' comic strip, so don't expect "eat my shorts'".
So this story is going to get some crazy page hits. What's sad is that I generally remember all of them, and the circumstances surrounding them (OMG, Atari has their new 64-bit Jaguar console... but Apple and Bandai are creating the Pippen!).
There are a lot of things that aren't on there, but it's not that bad of a list in general. With one exception: what the hell is Word 6.0 for Mac doing on there? MacBU != Apple.
The story seems to start when Engadget and a few other sites, like Neowin and blink.nu posted some screenshots of the upcoming Windows Mobile 2005. Microsoft sent out the usual cease & desists, which is actually unusual for them, but that's what happened.
Where it turns really weird, is that Engadget was apparently able to cobble together a deal with Microsoft where they got permission to keep their sneak peak images and such up, and they were all over the forums in any case. Dave's Ipaq saw that they were everywhere, and saw that endgadget was able to carry them, so didn't see any reason why he shouldn't be able to carry the leaked snaps if everyone else was, so he did so, and is now having fun legal threatenings being turned his way. Lovely, stupid stuff.
*shrugs* If you're going to try to start assaulting and dismantling the community around your products, at least don't do it half-assed. Apple waited several years before they started their on blitzkrieg the community, but they did it right and in a fairly total fashion. Going by past history, Microsoft will probably need a few tries.
Kevin Rose has taken a new Mac Mini and violated it with a nano-ITX board, basically giving you a x86 PC with a Mac Mini enclosure. Works well, but due to the shape of the motherboard he used the optical drive wouldn't fit. (duh: here's the mirrordot link if the above dies)
For a user of an alternative platform, while the devil is the details, this could potentially be one of the biggest stories of the decade:
Microsoft is loosening licensing rules on Office 2003 formats in order to get around new "open standard" restrictions to be adopted by the US state of Massachusetts, according to a state official.
Microsoft told the state it is planning to modify the licensing scheme around its proprietary, patented, XML-based document formats, Kriss said, and as a result Massachusetts is planning to support the formats. Adobe's pdf format will also be supported, Kriss said, according to reports.
Awhile ago, Steve Jobs gave some quotes in a magazine, talking about how as companies mature, the sales guys have a habit of running them and the company starts to lose its soul. Something like that.
C-Net has another good article up talking about the fault lines that seem to be growing between the independent security researchers and the vendors. Specifically under the microscope is the guy who released a whole slew of vulnerabilities to the public, that it had known about for seven months, without first going to Apple to allow them to have updates ready.
I don't quite know why I find this so amusing:
Subscribers to the UK mailing list of Bang & Olufsen (B&O), the upmarket Hi-Fi firm, were bombarded with six million emails this week. List membes are hopping mad, but B&O blames the problem on flaws with some of its customers’ email systems, rather than any security breach on its part.An email plugging an integrated TV/DVD sent out to the list on Monday (24 January) generated a message storm when it hit buggy Small Business Server 2003 servers. The well-known glitch in email systems of three of the recipients of the message generated a blitz of replicated emails.
Now, both Apple and Bang & Olufsen are high-end luxury product makers, charging a premium to those who like to live the good life, so there are synergies. However, in this case Bang & Olufsen would seem to have a large surplus of email, while .Mac subscribers never really know when they'll be able to have access to email, so it would seem as though a partnership was in order.
Anyone who has read any of the history of our technology, or rather the history of the ways we have have come to try to keep it closed and secret, usually comes away with the feeling that if you create a technical barrier to something, someone, somewhere will create a technical solution to overcoming.
It's generally considered to be always possible, it's just not always easy or worth the effort. It's generally become a defacto rule of thumb and it's easy to become a bit jaded about it. Which is probably why I got such a cheesy grin on my face reading about the guys nilss effort to reverse-engineer the 4G iPod's bootloader so he could slap Linux on it, using the iPod's peizoelectric crystal and guiding himself by the clicks. That's a lot of effort for 64kb of data.
Similar to the last Mac introduction video, someone put up one of Steve Jobs demonstrates NeXTSTEP 3.0, which is really cute. The site has basically been hammered off the grid for the moment, so I've posted a mirror of it here:
- stevejobs_nextdemo.gz (50 MB AVI)
If you're a Mac user, you'll probably need VLC or MPlayer to view the file. Mirror if you can, and use any mirrors that might be in the comments/trackbacks if you can.
Regarding Funneled Performance, Clinton P writes:
What are the possibilities of 'porting' OS X to the linux kernel? Linux kernel has the real multi threading that is required and seems to be good enough for the IBM 710 multiprocessor server you just mentioned. It seems the BSD decision is holding back OS X. With IBM standardizing on Linux and Apple on the IBM processors it may be worth the effort to migrate.
Lots of questions in this one, so we're going to have to break them out individually in order to keep things coherent.
Macminute says Apple will give you a refund of the difference if you ordered a Mac Mini before the price drops yesterday, but you have to call. Good of Apple to do it; although in this situation I can't imagine any sane company not doing it.
All the same, it wouldn't be the first time someone ordered an Apple product and the price had dropped by the time they got it, so I'm glad they checked up on it. It also looks like Target.com has removed all references to the Mac Mini on their site, and the SuperDrive has been returned to 4x.
When you stop and think about it, the first two weeks of the Mac Mini's life have been a bit bizarre, even by Apple standards.
Wesley pointed me to the fact that Apple has quietly lowered the prices on some of the expansion options for the Mac Mini:
The company is now offering the Bluetooth and AirPort Extreme wireless option for US$99 (was $129), the 1GB DDR333 SDRAM upgrade for $325 (was $475), and the 80GB ultra ATA hard drive upgrade for $50 (was $80). Apple is also now listing an 8x SuperDrive option instead of the previous 4x model for the same $100 cost.
Gruber passed on this bit of web deliciousness: an archive of Apple commercials that totals 780 megs. It's a bittorrent archive, so you'll want to go here if you're without it, or perhaps someone will be nice and link to a 'getting up to speed' page on bittorrent in the comments.
Because these commercials influenced me so, I decided to look at other commercials Apple had done, During the process of carefully analyze their commercial, I noticed that they have clearly mastered the art of television advertising. Thusly, a decision was made, by me, to compile an archive of Apple Commercials in a single BitTorrent file. It’s not complete but it’s as extensive of a collection you’ll find on the web.
I'd mirror the archive for those who didn't want to go through the hassle, but the last thing I mirrored has gotten completely out of hand since midnight and to be honest, Apple has gotten a little too comfortable with suing websites instead of just sending a notice. Sigh, the fact that that actually went through my head, over some commercials, shows how powerful the chilling effect is.
Awhile ago, The Register had a story up saying that a European filing had tipped Apple's hand at creating a Tablet Computer:
The filing, made in May this year but only published this week, covers a "handheld computer" and contains sketches of what look like an iBook screen minus the body of the computer.
So many Mac Mini links, so little time.
Several days ago I saw that ThinkSecret was able to get counsel, and once again my love for the Electronic Frontier Foundation was reaffirmed, which I'll go into in a moment. That faith may not be reaffirmed for everyone, but I know a few people in the EFF, and I honestly don't think they'd marshal resources behind something that wasn't worthwhile.
There are reasons why they're protecting PowerPage and AppleInsider, and reasons why they've marshalled their resources to get attention brought to the Think Secret case so they had a better chance of getting counsel. For those in that camp my inbox has been primarily divided into several veins... my views on them might not be 'popular', and might surely be influenced by my frame of reference, but that's why they're my views and not dogma.
I've been following Apple's lawsuit against ThinkSecret with interest. As Donna Wentworth so eloquently states in 'EFF to Apple: Back Off', there are differences between each case, both between the kids being sued in the ThinkSecret case, and the kids being sued for leaking a Tiger build onto the internet, but it's interesting to note how they all came about at around the same time. As someone once said, it might be "too coincidental to be a coincidence."
I was just going to post this interview (14 MB) with Steve Jobs that someone sent to me yesterday from after the keynote which I dug (Ken Burns is not mentioned once). However, judging by my Inbox, one of the biggest things that stuck out at people from yesterday's post was the whole Sony thing.
People also sent rants agreeing about the UI problems in 10.4 (Yes, I've seen the movies at Apple's site, and yes I'm scared), but apparently the Sony part sparked caused a whole bunch of speculation to be thrown my way. Obviously I wasn't the only one really confused by it, so it's worth (hopefully) clearing that up.
I meant to have this out late on the night of the keynote, but circumstances, like the keynote not streaming for me, conspired against me. I really did want to watch the actual keynote to let the RDF do its magic and hopefully round out some more rough edges in my mind. That sort of happened, yet sort of didn't.
I finally got it to stream, but I will say that while this wasn't the worst experience I've had with streaming a keynote, it's the most annoying in recent years. Once it was up, it was jerky, and the audio would lose sync with the video way too often for my tastes. Nothing would fix it, not even changing machines and locations or platforms.
I got 19 '-5408 Time Out' errors, which isn't exactly a great lead-in... but my running commentary while watching it is a tradition now. Otherwise I would have given up. Seriously, it was that annoying.
I was reading through a very sobering VARBusiness article on Apple and it's resellers, and it along with some other things continually makes me wish I'd get off my ass and get that link blog going for awhile I'm working on other things.
My inbox is somewhat abuzz about Apple quietly releasing a firmware update for the iPod that disables Real's Harmony technology. After I get through my email bin, I almost don't have to check my feeds. When it's 1am and I haven't even touched them, having the news come to you is kinda cool.
English-speaking users have gotten more than their fair shake of the internet as a whole, and frankly I love it. I was born somewhere else, and the few years of a foreign language I was forced to take in school have rapidly dissipated from my brain as every year goes on.
Part of me is wishing I'd paid more attention to those classes, but the other part is grateful Americans are allowed the luxury of just not paying that great of attention to other countries unless we're heading there as tourist.
So, that was fun. After going through all the feedback from the last post, I figured I'd take time out from my normal saturday morning googling for a new hangover cure and try to answer a good chunk of it. As usual, where applicable questions of a similar vein are paraphrased and aggregated.
Some users get a bit of sick joy when it comes to bashing Microsoft on security, but like most spewing demagoguery they're generally leaving out the context, and no matter what the subject, context is important. Without context, it's very difficult to learn.
I encountered a user like this the other day, gleefully gloating over a user who found they'd been infected with some spyware like a monkey throwing its poo at the zoo. This really left a bad taste in my mouth, and since it's been awhile since I've had a long, half-baked stream of consciousness on the blog, here we go.
The iPod Photo has been causing me some headaches. Mostly because the hype has been so strong around the Mac web, but no one has really been able to tell me why I'd want one. (note: this is only about the iPod Photo... my thoughts on the 'U2 Special Edition' can be summed up with: "How 80's. And not in a good way")
I've been spending some time playing with the new Firefox builds for Mac OS X, and I have to say I've been impressed. In grabbing the nightly build, I was able to have links sent to it from other apps finally open in a tab instead of a new window, something I've been whining about forever. Keyboard shortcut goodness is in too, and combined with the potential of it's extension system... Firefox is getting really, really solid on OS X.
It's so solid that I wanted to take a look at it in the context of Safari and the larger browser sphere as a whole. As a word of warning, this one is going to be long-ish, and has been banged out before my normal morning-after doses of B1 and hair of the dog. I.E., par for the course.
I haven't even had my morning-after coffee yet, and my inbox is just abuzz that there's probably some serious malware possibly making the rounds on Mac OSX.
Ah well, I need something to bang on while I'm waiting for the coffee to brew and my morning infusion of the nectar of the bean lets me think in a more coherent and structured way.
An article on MacWorld regarding the announcement of Cherry OS seems to have thrown a bee in the bonnet of a lot of mac users. This is only going by my mail, but they're predominantly skewed towards Cherry OS at the moment.
I was looking over the ArsTechnica review of the dually 2.5GHz G5, and it's pretty close to spot-on against my experience with playing with one of them for a bit. The Ars review is solid and worth a read, although I wish they'd harp even sharper on some of the limitations... like the two drive limit and the wimpy graphics card. Plus you can see their new layout, which doesn't have black-on-white type... yay!
You'd sorta think that a company known for its fanatical 'highly enthusiastic' user base would go out of its way not to dress it's employees in black and white sneakers... If the Koolaid man comes out during a keynote, I'm soooo switching to Linux.
Been sifting through a ton of mail regarding the last post... learned a valuable lesson. People really take their iPods really, really seriously. Fair enough, but since a lot of the feedback seemed to fall into similar categories, I figured I'd paraphrase some of the questions and answer as best I know how...
There are some really interesting things going on in iPod land, starting with the fact that RealNetworks announced that after being diss'ed & dismissed by Apple when they approached them to talk about opening up the iPod to Real's competing service, they went ahead and reverse-engineered how the iPod deals with DRM'd media files via their new 'Harmony' software.
My view is going to be a little different than the direction other people are going on this one, as I believe the last few steps are pointing to greater maneuvering as a whole... they've found their Next Big Thing™. I don't really think RealNetworks themselves are significant, they're just the most desperate.
If you were watching the 2004 Apple WWDC Keynote, or even just checking out the upcoming 10.4 Tiger release you may have noticed Apple giving a lot of time to something called 'H.264/AVC' which it looks like they're moving to whole hog and has me pretty excited. Apple has a fairly glossed over page which talks about it, and if you're going to actually read the rest of this I'd head over and at least skim as I'll reference it some later. Plus it has some pretty pictures.
As a disclaimer: These are the pieces as I know them; and if I know something wrong hit me with the clue stick or fill in gaps. I'm pretty sure its reasonable, if a bit over-the-top in terms of length again.
It was with a heavy heart that I read that Yellow Dog Linux will be dropping support for 'old-world' macs with the advent of their upcoming new fedora-based distro, meaning that the beige G3 machines have just been struck another blow.
The old 233MHz iMacs are supported, as they're 'new world', meaning their ROM is loaded into memory and actually jammed onto the motherboard.
Businessweek.com has a decent article up about Apples changing relationship with their resellers which is something I've talked about from time to time. It's kind of old news, from about a week ago (yeah, I'm behind) so I wasn't going to bother posting it...
But I'm clearing out some bookmarks before I try to post another chat tonight and I found the subject a little ironic when put into the context of Apple kinda sorta basically having nothing to sell in the consumer space for the next 3-5 months (yes mindflayer I saw it before I crashed ;)) due to the delay of the iMac.
I originally started keeping notes about my last AppleCare experience in a log simply because whenever you have to deal with any form of bureaucracy, no matter how benign, there is one cardinal rule: document, document, document. Had a whole nice little flowchart.
But then it started getting somewhat comical, so I figured I'd write it out and kill a few birds with one stone again... And no, this isn't the larger Powerbook post I've been promising, things are severely backlogged around here at the moment with personal issues.
Who knows, someone might even be able to glean something from it, or at least find it amusing... I ended up logging a hair over 10 hours on the phone alone with Apple over this, and I know I've never, ever had an AppleCare experience like that before.
I guess some people sort of expected me to rant about the new G5s. I tried to summon up some sort of a rant, but there's remarkably little to add from my older G5 squandered post.
The first thing that prolly comes to mind is *Yawn*.
I had to deal with AppleScript on Friday, and it left me as annoyed and weirded out as it always does. If you aren't aware, AppleScript is a scripting language based on an english-like syntax, and is one of the technologies that saved Apple's ass in the prepress world in the late 90s. If you're a windows user, think in terms of VBScript.
Eons ago, the mac UI wasn't riding atop a POSIX-style environment... there was no shell, and what multi-user functionality was eventually added was pretty much a hack. The lack of a shell, or command line interface was a bit of a problem. While graphical user interfaces are fantastic for some things, they are a drag and a half for anything remotely repetitive.
Fred McCann passed on this interesting tidbit over at ThinkSecret, who claim they have gotten their mitts on some early documents showing Apples' plans to shift revenue from the reseller channel to their own. Interesting bits:
A different Apple document says that part of the company's growth strategy would be to "shift customers from channel... Apple would do this through an "exclusive value proposition"... such as the recently-announced ProCare -- as well as competitive repair prices, Apple-branded goods, rewards for loyal customers, and a "better" value for build-to-order hardware......Apple's own numbers indicate that the company has experienced success in shifting sales from the channel to its stores. At a recent private company meeting, Apple revealed that in markets that lack a retail store, independent resellers have grown 8%, but in markets with an Apple store, they have declined 16%. Catalog and Web sales have decreased as well, by Apple's numbers, making CompUSA the only non-Apple winner...
...It then goes on to bring up the lawsuits that have been ongoing for awhile now regarding Apples accounting practices and customer poaching, and other interesting bits. Unfortunately they don't actually show the papers, or reference them somewhere else (send them to the smokinggun.com or something guys), so you can see for yourself.
Most of the info lines up, but without seeing the documents they claim to be referencing in some form it difficult to tell whether or not they actually have them, have heard things, or are making up specifics to fit what we're seeing.
Cringley has a new column out called "Divide and Conquer" which is worth a read if you're a mac user. Of particular interest to me is this bit:
Absolutely look for the rape of the resellers, and then MAYBE look for the end of Macintosh hardware.
...as I've been wondering about resellers more and more as time goes on when looking at some of Apple's stock configurations.
If you are buying a PowerMacG5 or PowerbookG4, and want any decent kind of options at all (decent video card, more VRAM, faster stock drives) you aren't going to be able to get them unless you order through Apple.
Resellers are stuck with the stock config. When the Powerbooks hard drive isn't even user-serviceable in the newer models... if I were a reseller, I'd be pretty pissed off.
Then I'd be scared to death.
And arguably the retailers have a real right to be scared... this isn't the first time Cringley and others have seen small moves by Apple, which when added up really, really paint a dire picture for the resellers.
I've gotten mail about the new security exploit going around for MacOS X, either to give me a heads up on it, or to ask my thoughts on it... which is kind of odd, but cool too...
I've always kind of wondered what exactly Al Gore brings to the table by being on Apple Computer's board of directors. At the very least, you'd think he'd be sorta up on current events and could raise some red flags.
Some current oddities:
- Apple's WWDC (worldwide developer conference) has been announced and scheduled for June 30th, 2004. If you aren't aware, that's kinda sorta when sovereignty over their country is supposed to be handed over to Iraq. If I were a betting man, I wouldn't be surprised if something might happen that caused technology announcements to get... a little drowned out. Unless Gore knows something we don't, and gave Apple the big thumbs-up. Yay.
- They've code-named the upcoming release of Mac OSX "Tiger", which does keep in their current tradition of product code names involving cats. Unfortunately round-about the time that Tiger will be released, a certain flamboyant las vegas magician who, you know, got bit in the neck by a white tiger will be starting to make the rounds on TV and giving interviews... and you just know they're going to be running that clip on TV millions of times. Start making your jokes now, I can already picture the desktop wallpapers we're going to see. Unfortunately they're already linked in my mind.
Anyways, just a thought. Then again I'm the guy who held onto his 667MHz Powerbook because the real CPU frequency was 666.666, and, you know, having the devils laptop is a good conversation starter.
Adam Johnson was kind enough to pass this guys blog entry on, which gives the details on how to get Mac OSX running on x86 hardware via PearPC. The guy demoed it on ScreenSavers tonight.
There's a pretty nifty interview with Miguel de Icaza over at OSNews that's worth a read, if your brain goes that way. It mostly focuses on Mono, software patents and Linux adoption.
But several have mailed be about this blurb on the second page (which is cool):
We asked whether a Mac OS X native version of GTK# or Cocoa# is planned, but the answer was negative. Ximian is not working on OSX native toolkit bindings (and he doesn't think that Apple is working on something like it either)... Miguel told us that Quark is using Mono for their next major Quark Xpress release! Apparently Quark is working on Obj-C bindings for Mono.However, the graphical toolkit bindings will be minimal (an update on this here), so he hopes that Mac enthusiasts will jump in to complete a full Cocoa# solution, or natively port GTK+ 2.x...
...which has apparently sparked some deja vu. Things are getting really, really interesting on the desktop side of things, really quickly.
You get the sense of a buildup waiting for a catalyst, but no one is quite sure where that's going to come from, where Apples strategy is going to fit in the whole deal, or if its going to get squeezed out.
There's a lot of flack that's started yesterday and today, mostly over the amount of holes that may/may not exist in Mac OSX that aren't being exploited, but that isn't really what worries me.
Most technology platforms seem to catch their breaks and go full-on once sex gets involved. Witness the VCR, the internet, or most pop-music careers.
This prolly bodes well for Apple's iChat AV, now that iChatnaked.com is in um... beta testing. It's worth a look just to see the group icons. You can't make this stuff up.
For more iChat weirdness, you should head over to Zachs' Freakiest iChat Evar post. I lol'd pretty hard while reading down, but it was late at the time.
Sooo... been an interesting couple of days.
The weekend started out innocently enough, I just happened to notice I hadn't touched the blog in awhile & the front page was looking kind of empty... so I threw together Rhapsody in Yellow to assuage the guilt and posted it in a hurry on Friday afternoon before I headed out the door.
Cool evening ensued, which consisted of (in order):
- Kill Bill vol.2 (rocked my world)
- Food
- 4 tall Tooheys
- 5 white russians (talls)
- 1 shot of something I don't really remember
- 1 shot of tequila the bartender bought us
- Stop @ Krispy Kreme for donuts and lots of coffee
So, decent Friday. Got home well after midnight and decided to check the computer for messages before I crashed, and even in my altered state it was obvious something was wrong. Gyazmail was taking forever to pull in my mail, and AdiumX was telling me there were messages from 20+ people I'd never heard from left while I was away.
My mail came in, and I thought I'd been mail-bombed for a second there.
Disclaimer: This one is going to be fairly long, and if you've been in the Appleverse for quite a long while a lot is going to feel like review... we're going to have to hit the wayback machine™ several times when talking about certain technologies. While I'll talk a lot about them, I'm not writing a book so it's not going to be exhaustive. But it should be enough, and while we'll cover enough ground to get the gist across, google & linkage should be your friend. As it stands, this could probably have been broken up, but I feel I owe my 12 loyal readers something of length to make up my... erratic posting schedule.
So... I was having a chat recently with someone about the lack of a certain software title for the Mac, which really seemed to be cramping their style. This eventually meandered (alcohol was involved) into a much larger topic:
What the hell is going on with independent development & the Mac?
It's obvious there have been changes, as others have touched upon, such as a big influx of *nix users to their developer base. But as far as big, high-quality apps... there just aren't many, and those that are being released are from the usual suspects. Nothing much new. Isn't Cocoa a developer nirvana, and doesn't the "power of Cocoa" allow one guy to do the work of 5?
If you just looked at the positive press going out on the G5, you could be forgiven for believing the G5 to be one blockbuster-selling piece of kit for Apple. However, this isn't really the case.
While it's gotten great press, when you actually look at the figures, it's pretty clear that it's been more than a little lackluster. Which isn't to dismiss the positive press, it's been pretty spectacular for a company with Apples' history. The idea of an "Apple Supercomputer" has been something of an oxymoron for a long time, especially given some of their earlier G4 advertisements. At the moment, it's not, which is super cool.
There have been some negatives, like basically being told by governments that their advertising was lying not quite truthful, or quiet articles basically saying that the G5 is not hitting expectations... but on the whole things like the Virginia Tech supercomputer have been fantastic for slowly shifting the perception of some of Apple's kit, and where it can be used.
If you'd have made a bet with most people as to whether or not Apple's towers would be powering one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet in a year, it's a bet most people would have lost (including myself, and, if some of the interviews from the VT cluster's architect are to be believed, Apple also...). Some kudo's are in order there: Apple used to have one hell of a share in the scientific market, which slowly eroded over time, but it's now making some serious inroads back into. Credit where credit is due, you can at least use the words Apple & performance in the same paragraph without feeling queasy. Credit where credit is due.
But that's being squandered. Now, some of you are going to go "Microsoft shill! The G5 is selling tons more units than the G4! How much is microsoft paying you!", and that's fine. But let's take a look at the unit numbers by quarters for their towers, in thousands of units:
- 2002Q1 213
- 2002Q2 211
- 2002Q3 167
- 2002Q4 176
- 2003Q1 157
- 2003Q2 157
- 2003Q3 133
- 2003Q4 221 (G5 intro)
- 2004Q1 206
Woo hoo! When the G5 was intro'd, there was an instant 60% jump. How can that not be good? Well, it is good. However, you have to realize just how poorly the current G4 towers were selling. It isn't hyperbole to say they were selling incredibly poorly. The G5 has basically brought them up to 2002 G4 numbers, which aren't considered to be good numbers at all, even when compared to the heyday of the 2000-esque advertising boom.
It can't be stressed how poor a level sales of the G4 towers reached. We're not talking cube-esque numbers here, but it's obvious the only people buying them were people who had to have a mac tower, and couldn't wait. Most just weren't interested, no matter how much mac users talked about the "Megahertz Myth", it's fairly obvious that the price performance ratio was way out of whack. But, but the G5 is the fastest personal computer on the planet, right? So that should be taken care of... which is part of the problem: The G5 has not only failed analyst's expectations, it's fallen far short of Apple's own estimations which it gave to the analysts.
Apple's big line to the analysts was that people weren't buying G4's because of a perceived performance problem, the lack of native software for some of their core markets, and the huge advertising slump. They basically said the 1st two were fixed, and the 3rd was turning around bigtime, so bring on the upgrade churn as they believed there is a large chunk of their base who were waiting with baited breath to move on, and that the G5 was going to sell in fantastic numbers due to this backlog.
It just hasn't happened en-mass as they'd hoped, at least not yet. Some of it is dependent on 3rd parties, some of it is unavoidable, but some assuredly rests on Apple's shoulders, and some of it, while it may not be 'their fault', is still very much their problem when it comes to 3rd parties.
Now we don't know how they are doing this quarter, but we can infer that they aren't doing very well. They've been running promotion after promotion with them lately, and the G5 hasn't left Apple's front page with lots of life-altering quotes about it from various bigwigs... sure, since it's been 9 months since a real refresh, chances are they trying to clear out inventory before a refresh soon. But that usually involves some price cuts and perhaps a quick deal or two, but they are trying really damn hard to move units. Really hard.
So, if we can say that the we've established that the G5 sales are "underperforming", we should probably look at why that might be? Besides some of the obvious, the G5 is a very... perplexing machine in some ways:
- Odd initial launch lineup
They launched with single 1.6GHz, 1.8GHz & dually 2GHz. That was really weird, and arguably way out of whack. The top end was outselling the low end configs combined, by a huge margin, which is a pretty big clue stick that something is really wrong in the lineup. This has happened before. There was a time when Apple was releasing their high-end as a single proc system, and the rest were duals... which didn't exactly go over so well either. In the days of OS9 there was some justification for it, but not really with OSX: most people now know that duallies have massively better ROI, especially with with an OS that does its best to take full advantage of them. In this case, for several hundred dollars more, you just got a huge amount of extra power. The 1.6's & 1.8's weren't selling well, especially the 1.8's, they were just in this no-man's land of pricing. Apple stepped in and made the 1.8's duallies during a refresh, but now you have all these single 1.8's still in the channel (check any catalog or mac site). - Forget what we told you you wanted before...
It's a slightly larger case than the G4's that came before it, yet has drastically reduced expansion options when it comes to drives. There is no way a single serial ATA drive is going to saturate that bus. I don't think two even comes close. These cry out for RAID5, which would need a minimum of 3 drives. All you can basically get is software RAID 1 & 0, which for a machine in the G5's class is just kind of odd. To get RAID5 or other hardware raids you're essentially looking at firewire, which really adds to your costs and creates its own issues or you're looking at a very pricey external ultrascsi solution. Egh. Having only two drives is just very out of place in a machine of this caliber, and is perplexing. When you realize Apple tried to sell recent revisions on increasing drive bays, as well as dual optical, it gets more perplexing. Spending $3k on a large tower with two drive bays is just odd. - Saggy GPUs
Consumer-level, and dare i say close-to-cheapo-pc-level video cards in a workstation-class machine. $50 upgrade to something reasonable, $350 upgrade to a competitive card. 64megs of VRAM in a $3k computer that may be driving 2 displays unless you pay $350? Wtf? That's perplexing, especially for who these systems are geared to. Yeah it's fine if Apple has given up on the game market, but there are other reasons to want a more future-proof GPU and lots of VRAM... especially considering Quartz. - Product overlap
It's kinda weird how Apple went through so much trouble wiping out the deadzones from its product line, and has lately been blurring the lines all over the place. Part of this was out of desperation ("we can't compete on g4 towers, but we can build a decent laptop with their lower thermals- year of the notebook!"), but there's really a lot of overlap. Apple is talking up powermac users using powerbooks instead, but I don't really know about that. While I've seen it, and I'm sure there's some of that, but for their core content creation market the capabilities between a 1.25GHz G4 powerbook with a single slower drive and a dually G5 is pretty drastic. But I have seen a lot of people picking up a 17" or 20" iMac instead of a low end G5 w/apple display. - MHz stagnation relapse
When they did refresh the line (and surprisingly quickly) it was to go to 1.6 & dually 1.8 & 2GHz, which again, was kind of weird. To keep the MHz momentum up you would have thought there would have been some progression, if nothing else to help differentiate the low end from the iMacs. As it is, the G5's have been riding on 2GHz for over 9 months, meaning you can only coast for so long. - 1st gen issues haven't been fixed
The G5 hardware is still relatively immature, and hasn't yet had a good revision b or c. Some of the pro's out there were already pulling out their hair with the later G4 models (windtunnels, etc) but were a fairly well known quantity. The G5's have lots of new stuff, and there have been problems with heat, the fans, power supplies, logic boards, line noise... it's not to say that they're a POS, but they do have their first-gen-apple-problems. It's architecture is also very new, with 10.3.3 even bringing a big speed boost, and I'd have to be other apps will see revisions that will bring big gains... there are a number of people who don't want to buy 1st gen Apple hardware anymore, and Apple hasn't given them a revision to buy into. - Regaining trust is hard
This was something I had raised to me on a list, but makes a lot of sense... There was a ton of damage done to Apple's pro lines by their price/performance problems, even going back to when Microsoft was pushing hard into the content creation markets when NT/2000 hit the scene and Apple's next-gen OS strategy was starting to look DOA. Apple was able to rebuff that fairly well, both with lots of hype around rhapsody, showing they were going to have something to compete with NT/2000, and the fact that the media creation market, especially where print & advertising is concerned, is notoriously slow to move to anything. But the MHz problems dragged on for so long that a ton of people have jumped ship, and now they just aren't buying PowerMacs. They can make headway in bringing these people back, but it's going to take a sustained push as the leader, not one press release. Show these people where the momentum is, especially with AMD's new kit hitting.
All the above are reasons why the G5 is a bit of a perplexing machine, at least to myself, for various markets... but at this point there is another very serious problem they have to contend with: the 3GHz gap.
Lots of people are trying to spin things a bit, and say "Jobs said by the end of the summer, which is technically x... they have time" or similar things. Bullox. Jobs may have said the end of the summer, later, but that's not what he said at the introduction in and what was fed to the press.
The screen capture to the right should make it fairly obvious: Jobs said 3GHz within 12 months, on June 30th I believe. Which leaves a hair under 3 months for them to go from 2GHz to 3GHz. That is one pretty damn drastic jump in power in 3 months time, especially when you consider that the G5 has been out for 9+ months.
So, we were promised 3GHz by June 30th 2004, and there's no way of getting around that. Apple is either going to keep that promise, and lurch from 2GHz to 3GHz in 3 months (chances are it will be 'announced' but not ship for several months...) or they are going to break their promise. Again. Which would be... uncool.
Lots of people are saying things along the lines of "Saying they would hit 3GHz in a specific time frame was so stupid, now people aren't buying. They never should have said that". I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with that mindset. Apple making that statement was the coolest thing they'd done in awhile, and make no mistake they said it for a reason: it was a mindshare ploy. And a needed one, and if they had kept up the momentum it would have been a great one.
Apple's performance problems had become deep-rooted, and really a part of the computer world's psyche. Oh sure, they'd have a jump here and there... and then another long plateau. 2GHz, while a big jump from where they were at, wasn't that huge in the grand scheme of things... they were practically in danger of their MHz being lapped before that. They wanted to have people talking about the G5 as a huge break with what came before, that this was the big break with their past problems of under delivering. They didn't want people thinking about the G5 as being at 2GHz, but on it's way to 3GHz. That it had momentum.
Which is a big deal, and, one could argue, a drastic change from their long-standing modus operandi which while great for hype, is really off-putting to a lot of the people they are trying to make inroads with. Actually keeping their word, and making their ship dates is another big thing with these people. It hasn't played out that way, and now we're stuck hearing pondering on what might be causing the holdup instead of how the G5 is coming on strong.
This isn't just a tower thing: take the server market. People were/are extremely leery of buying into something that won't see good support, and would be dropped at the first sign of trouble. Apple had some very, very nasty mindshare with people when it came to servers due to their past history. People have this image of them going on product flights of fancy, then dropping them dead when it doesn't seem to be working out. This is... disconcerting, and something that will take years to overcome.
Which goes back to the deep-rooted performance/price ratio Apple has been saddled with for ages. The G5 could have been a break from that image in more ways than one, as it had gotten that bad: we're more likely to believe someone has recovered when they have hit rock bottom. Instead, we're seeing signs of a relapse with the G5.
Now of course we're going to see a 3GHz G5. But here's the thing: people are already expecting them to announce it at 2004's WWDC, but actually ship it several months later. That makes me a little sad, as it feels as though an opportunity to really start to change people's perception of Apple has been squandered.
Apple's discussion boards are down again, and I really need to look something up. Unamused. It's amazing how you stop keeping information when you just assume it will be available when you need it.
There's a really nifty page over at the University of Utah, about how they're using Apple's Xgrid technology to distribute their POV-ray rendering load out over labs of macs. Normally I wouldn't really care, as well, Xgrid is cool but is sort of tweener technology at the moment.
But along with the eye candy they have a really slick writeup on setting it up and their experiences with it. Worth a look, even if you're just interested in some of the pros and cons of this kind of technology.
I have had my serious tiffs with some Microsoft employees, especially over a specific Mail & Calender app they put out for OSX and it's downright scary database problems, and a particular product manager of an OSX client I won't mention *cough* Entourage *cough* who didn't even understand how the current vulnerabilities in Outlook were being exploited (convo can be found via a determined google). I'm no MS fanboy...
Ah, but I said there was embarrassing stuff... Essentially, Rick Schaut has a blog where he talks about various things he's involved with, like the MacBU, MS Word for the mac, etc. Pierre Igot also has a blog, and did a little rant on what he thinks MS should be doing. Um, essentially condemning them to the fires of hell and uncoolness for not using Apple's global spell checker and Address Book.
I'm all for rants, I partake in them at least daily. But this one was just stupid to start- it's obvious to anyone that it would be a decent chunk of work to just 'adopt' Apple's tech in this case. Which is fine, and really only two things went through my mind while reading his entry:
- This guy has never worked on a project of sizable scope successfully
- This guy doesn't seem to be in a field of work that has milestones, deadlines, and finite resources
- This guy really doesn't understand usability, but loves throwing around the buzzword, because honestly most people know that usability is very much like porn to most: hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it. So it's an easy word to regurgitate when you're reasonably sure the person you're throwing your puke at will be insecure enough about the ability recognize puke that they won't call your bluff
No worries. Normally one would just think the above, do the whole 'to each their own" mantra and move on. And that's that. But neu, it's just starting to get entertaining.
As it turns out, Mr. Schaut called his bluff. And then Pierre Igot begins to systematically turn himself into one of the biggest ass-hats in the entire OSX community, which is saying quite a bit when you consider the amount of asshats one encounters on a daily basis on various mac lists...
The "Moses down from the mountain with playdo tablets" types. Throw a tiny bit of water on their knowledge written in stone and they're screwed. And Mr. Schaut apparently brought buckets whereas Ingot brought a thimble. Oh, I'm sure Mr Ingot is chatting with his zealot pals and they're slapping each other on the back at a job well done. But handicapped kids do the same thing after winning the gold at the special olympics- they don't really know any better. But it's always entertaining watching the zealots hump one anothers legs in spasms of righteous one-button back-slapping...
Bygones. At this point Pierre Ingot is just one of the pack of the zealot asshats slithering around the mac world... not even a front runner. He'd just posted silly and ignorant things so far, no real personal attacks against the guy... although a slight insinuation was made. But neu, there are some people who are natural overachievers when it comes to being asshats, and Pierre Ingot really comes into his own as the comment thread keeps going. And going. And going.
And more zealots pop up. As Pooka would say, "Bitches, bitches, everywhere, and not a one to slap". Congratulations, Pierre Ingot- you've graduated from asshat, shot past arrogant dilettante asshat, and moved hardcore into whiny-asshat-elitist-bitch territory.
So, just to recap, in case you haven't been clicking above, here are the relevant links, in order:
Egh, I feel like I have to buy a copy of crappy MS Office 2004 just to help counterbalance some of the asshat karma.
Had this notice sitting in my inbox when I got home tonight. Excerpt:
In Mac OS X 10.2, Apple updated Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) to permit secure connections over SSH (Secure Shell) protocol. However, Chris Adams, a system administrator in San Diego, Calif., noted that while users could request secure connections, the system will not issue any alert or indication if an SSH connection is unavailable and then defaults to a non-secure connection. He noted that the only indication was a negative one—users must be aware that an alert "Opening Secure Connection" did not appear.
By way of explanation, AFP is the default file sharing protocol for the mac. With 10.x, AFP was extended to be tunneled over TCP/IP. This isn't that big of a deal for secure networks, but there are a lot of shops who use AFP over IP to transmit files between macs over the net. Obviously when you're going out over untrusted networks (ie, the internet) you want to do it securely. When they think they're doing it securely, but they're not, that just sucks.
But more disturbing:
Though Adams said he first reported this bug to Apple in early December 2003 and followed up weeks later, he received no response from the computer manufacturer. However, he told eWEEK.com that a final notice that he was going to release the information publicly resulted in a response on Friday.
So, a response time of 5-6 months until they even replied to the person submitting the vulnerability, let alone actually releasing a fix. This goes back to something I've been bitching about for awhile now.
Woo hoo! For a limited time you can save up to $700 on select memory upgrades from Apple.
On second thought, Dells sales generally bump you up to 512megs for free at the moment, and Apples RAM, so I decided to check what the difference might be, since well, you know, Apples RAM is on sale, and Dell isn't thought to have bargain basement RAM prices in the x86 world:
To go to 512megs of RAM:
Dell: FREE
Apple: $200
To go to 1gig of RAM:
Dell: FREE
Apple: $350
To go to 2gig of RAM:
Dell: $470
Apple: $650
To go to 4gig of RAM:
Dell: $2,350
Apple: $2450
I used Apple's single processor memory prices, with the savings applied, and using a best case scenario (IE, using four 512 modules instead of two for 1gig of RAM). But still, not so good. Dell is giving it away for free until 2gigs, at which point Apple is still 28% more expensive, even though its on sale. When not on sale, Apple's memory would be 50% more than Dells.
At 4gigs Apple is only 5% more expensive. And realize that going through someone like datamem, 4gigs would cost less than $1000.
I'm starting to think someone at Apple rings a bell every time a user buys RAM, its just a joke. I could have done some more, but it was getting a little silly. IE, Dells dually CPU lines all use ECC ram, and Apple only started using that in the XserveG5 a month ago or so, and Apple basically won't let you buy less than 1gig, whereas Dell starts you off at 256 and throws in stuff for free.
I one could start calculating based on what the upgrades cost, but that was more work than this laugh was worth.
Palm announced their new OS, Palm OS Cobalt (not going to comment on the name), which brings all kinds of goodness from their purchase of BeOS awhile ago. Multi-tasking, multi-threading, memory protection, more memory and much better graphics. For multimedia performance, BeOS was hard to beat, so this thing could really give the fancier pocketPCs a run for their money.
The bad news? They've dropped mac support completely, which is a little deflating as it was already very poor. People would often wait for months for palms conduit to be released for the mac whenever new versions came out.
Out of the 3 OSs (palm, pocketpc, zaurus), none include mac support now, so what the hell do you get if you're a mac user and you want/need a PDA? Kinda throws some water on the digital hub thing Apple is going for. Especially considering that Apple tried to buy Palm.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. The MacBU might include support for pocketpc's in order to help sell copies of entourage/officex, or Apple might get off their ass and create a serious, decent calendar solution. iCal is a pretty lame piece of software for a whole lot of reasons.
People are talking about the Zaurus, because it runs using Linux, but they seem to be forgetting that just getting some of the software over isn't really going to cut it, nor is just being able to connect. You still have to get your data onto it and from it. Palm, due to its size, could release it's connector and Apple, Microsoft, and the others would support it.
Who knows, maybe Apple will try to buy Palm again. Even if they don't care about little squiggly interfaces, I'm sure there is a ton of BeOS IP that could migrate into OS.
Depressing. The devil is in the details with users, and syncing data to and from PDAs was already a royal pain in the ass for mac users. Not being able to sync/use PDAs is going to get real lame real quick.
10.3 has a theoretically very cool API that will solve a lot of problems regarding controlling/managing internet connections for developers, called SCNetworkConnection. Unfortunately it's barely documented. By that I mean there is zero documentation.
There are other examples of this kind of thing, just looking at 10.3... like diskarbitrationd, a neat little daemon for handling disk mounting and the like. It's man page barely gives you an idea of what it does. Or scutil.
I'm just ranting about 10.3 stuff, but lack of documentation has been a bit of a joke for a long, long time. It's a real problem, and I can't imagine the frustration I'd have if I was messing with this stuff full time.
If you're not a developer, you can sort of get an idea of that frustration they have to deal with by looking at Apple's help system. Barely functional, and far from informative.
I'm having to dive into PPLib, but guess what... Apple says its not supported, and could go away at any time, so use the newer API for everything, which isn't documented.
Sucky. This isn't some shareware product, we're simply talking quality and polish. And it's been such an ongoing problem, version-to-version, year-after-year, that you have to reach the conclusion that it just isn't a priority for Apple.
The worst excuse I've heard is "Would you rather have the programmer writing documentation, or writing new code?" which is such a circular argument as to never be valid.
Went up early this morning... can be viewed here. The marketing aspects are pretty transparent, almost a bit lame, but you do get an "OMG this could raise some hackles" feel from it. I just hate when its obvious when adults are trying to make an ad that will manipulate the kiddies mindset towards them. And yes, that means I hate most fast food and kid cereal commercials and the like with a passion.
There are slicker ways to do it... the new iPod commercials are an example of building an image without being shucky. Would have loved to be in the meetings on getting this one approved.
I'm more interested in just how much extra publicity it might pick up from news stations talking about the ad.
This is just kind of surreal: the rumor is that HP is working with Apple to get WMA support added. From the article:
HP's blockbuster deal with Apple will have one exciting side effect, I discovered today. The company will be working with Apple to add support for Microsoft's superior Windows Media Audio (WMA) format to the iPod by mid-year. You heard it here first.
I dunno. From HP's standpoint, I could see how they'd want it. Almost all of the other paid music download sites use .wma, and if you check out kaaza and the like you'll find it becoming really popular. Hence, there are lots of people that would want to be able to play .wma files on their iPods.
What I don't get is one of the things that haven't really been touched upon by Apple or others much: That Apple is in a war right now with MS over media formats. Really similar to the browser wars... basically, if everything goes .wmv/.wma/etc, Apple is going to be kinda screwed in the consumer space. If everything goes mpeg4/AAC/etc, MS is gonna be really unhappy.
Apple says the iTunes store is all about selling iPods, but really it's also about pushing AAC adoption. Adding .wma support would help sell iPods, but really hurt AAC adoption, so... At any rate, Dell having nothing to say was kind of a nice bonus. :)
There's a pretty good writeup of Macworld over at Ars. It's getting a lot of flak, mostly from mac people, but really, it kinda says it like it is. It's very, very short. Normally these things are a long blow by blow over every announcement and demo: this is extremely short. It talks more about the culture & atmosphere than the actual keynote, and barely mentions the announcements.
If anything, I think people are taking it too literally: it doesn't gloss over the keynote to be spiteful, it's just putting it in perspective. It was probably the lamest MacWorld I can remember since Amelio stepped down to be honest. So if you're reading it to find out all the tidbits that went on, it'll be worthless. As a commentary on the experience, it's very good. So yeah, I think it was intentional that there is more space devoted to the illicit surfing habits of the media representatives as there was to the actual keynote itself.
Some favorite tidbits:
"If you worked at Apple, if you breathed coolness every working day, how could you tell if your breath went bad? You couldn't. So you might make a Cube. Worse, if you reinvent the music industry with the ultimate player/store combo, how could you get past that? Why wouldn't you do more of the same and think it would be great — it would be to you. But that still doesn't answer the question of why I didn't see it coming."
...and:
"The entire event was macabre and possessed of itself an almost feverish quality, as if everyone was pretending something, or ignoring something, and they knew it but would not speak, and as the program progressed they grew more desperate. That was Keynote 2004. And if you think I went on about nothing, well at least you could get up and go to the bathroom. Unless they are handing out iCatheters at the entrance next year, count me out."
There's a decent article on hyperthreading over at 2cpu.com which is worth a look if you haven't been following. No it's not a panacea, but it's still very, very cool. You have go give Intel props on this one... people have been talking about it for years, but they beat everyone to the punch by a good margin, and in a commodity CPU no less.
IBM & Sun are still working on it, but it'll eventually make it into the Power CPU's and hence, probably into some upcoming Apple CPUs. And since the mac world is so boring right now, if you're interested in this sort of thing its worth a gander.
Basically, hyper-threading is about trying to use current processors more effectively in most cases by making the CPU appear as two separate processors instead of one. When a CPU is working on a process/thread, and has to pause to wait for more data before it can proceed... the CPU is basically hanging out wasting potential cycles. Bubbles get formed in the pipeline, meaning if that part of the pipe could have been filled more work would have gotten done. HT allows the CPU to swap in a second thread for processing instead of hanging out and waiting for more data to proceed.
Not sure about what pipelines & bubbles are? Ars has lots of good info, especially this article, as well as this one. But basically, because CPU speeds have scaled an order of magnitude faster than the architectures designed to feed them data, they do all sorts of crazy (and cool) things to stay ahead of the data. Caches help a lot, but are expensive. Better branch prediction helps, but has gotten so good that its getting very expensive to progress, and even then, its going to fail.
Hyper-threading doesn't seem to be perfect, and it certainly doesn't take the place of an actual secondary processor. Its just a very cheap way to allow current processors some more performance headroom- and the cases where HT will actually slow down a computer seem to be fairly small. But a 20-40%+ speed increase is pretty slick.
Here's the thing I'm actually hot about: it drastically encourages threading in development. You can't really count on a machine having more than one CPU, so often really threading your app well can be a hard sell. It makes it more difficult to code, and you can even see a minor performance hit on a single CPU machine. Even in Apple land, which is considered to be huge on dual processors really isn't.
IE, it's fairly clear that Apple really only goes the dual CPU route when it feels it really needs to in order to add value, either because their chips aren't fast enough or other reasons. They've seemed to have gotten their dual config act together (there was a time where you could buy a dual CPU machine from them for less than their top end single CPU offering, which was ~100MHz faster if that) but you can't really count on them.
Developers can't count on them either: out of something like 12 different machines they sell, only two configs are dual CPU, and before a month ago it was only one! There are still lots of reason to look into threading, but its generally kept fairly basic: IE, having your main process run in a separate thread so that it doesn't block the UI while its doing its thing. Similar things happened with Altivec: it's only very recently that every single box Apple ships supports it. With HT support across the board, even single CPU machines start to see real benefit from pervasive threading.
This is something from the old BeOS days: thread the hell out of every single damn thing you do, and it will take a hell of a lot to bog down the user experience. Of course from what everyone has said, BeOS was a nightmare to program for because of it. But that's something I'm hoping to see Apple tackle too in the future... lord knows the Cocoa & Carbon frameworks at the very least could use a serious once over with threading in mind. But even beyond that: things like performSelectorOnMainThread really helped making threading an easier job in 10.2+, but there is so much other stuff that could be done.
I know they're working on some of it: IE, things like improving the funnels situation (something really kind of screwing over OSX's performance & user experience right now). Sigh. But back to my original thing: that having HT on Mac CPUs would greatly encourage developers to go nuts with threading, especially if Apple goes out of their way to also encourage. By increasing the thread-reentrancy of a lot of the Cocoa & Carbon frameworks, as an example.
The bad part about all of this is that you're probably not going to see it on your desktop for awhile. IBM is talking it up something fierce, and it's going to be hitting the Power5. When that trickles down to the G5 is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't expect to see it in the next revision that is supposed to take it to 3GHz. And even then, by the time those CPUs actually make it into the entire line...
Since I've been trying to find out more information on it in my spare time, so I might as well list some of the good linkage I've found:
...are just kind of lame. Why can't someone just say "Yeah, that kinda sucks" instead of having to be some weird evangelist? The idea of tying a company/product so heavily into your sense of identity or self worth is just creepy. I don't normally pay it much mind, but most of the mac-oriented lists have become worthless over the last few weeks due to it.
They're stupid enough that you want to respond, but voracious enough that its just not worth ones time. There's one dweeb who has posted on one of the lists ~30+ times in one day. I'm not sure these people even have jobs.
The virus rarely realizes it is killing the host.
Apple had their keynote today. Pretty tame, really. Least I was semi-right about the colored iPods I blogged about... but no faceplates.
Came across this tidbit while catching up on some stuff. Not good at all, really. The only positive thing about all of this is that at least security guys are giving Apple's stuff an actual look... but isn't this the 2nd exploit regarding inadequate checking over input fields in like 2 months, both different?
Yeah, I know the first was a system-wide problem with cocoa text fields, and this is application specific. But come on- this is input checking on the keychain, the jewels to most of what the user might hold dear.
Basically, two things are coming to mind:
- Apple seems to not being real thorough on some of these things, which could bode ill. For every MS exploit out there, the other platforms (*nix, including osx) gain some positive brainwidth. When that starts getting overwhelming, you've got something. For every one Apple has to patch, they erase a lot more brainwidth than they gain through MS having a bad day. After the first cocoa text field exploit, I'd have hoped they'd been going nuts reviewing all others... as I'm sure that's what turned this guy onto looking into it.
- Apple doesn't seem to have any set policy regarding security issues- the left had doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing. In both of the last few cases, if I recall correctly, the researchers waited a bit over a month after notifying Apple to go public, usually because they simply couldn't get any word from Apple. They're in a whole different world with a lot of these guys, and are really going to need to adopt a strategy that doesn't end with security guy after security guy going public because they couldn't get a straight answer out of Apple.
There's an article in the Chicago Sun Times recently about the Michigan Ave. Apple store. Some of the highlights are:
- They're selling an iPod every 10 minutes
- The Michigan Avenue store has the highest traffic of all the Apple Stores
The iPod thing isn't what I was interested in, but the Michigan Ave store is really a sight to see even if you're not into macs, just from an architectural standpoint.
This is a big, ritzy area in Chicago- and downtown Chicago takes its architecture seriously. I suppose you'd have to go back through its history to understand what I meant- but as buildings have gone up, they've tried to keep the same "look & feel" of yesteryear below a certain eye level.
The requirements for the Schaumburg Mall Apple Store prolly weren't that big of a deal compared to all the others... it just had to look nice, and look like an Apple Store.
But the downtown store is just beautiful- the outside blends in with its surroundings, without garish signs or features, yet still adds visual value by being there. The splash of green for people who might be viewing it from above is an especially nice touch.
Very much worth a see if you are ever in the Magnificent Mile area doing some shopping... from the redline, get off at Chicago and its about 2 blocks east and a block south.
The rumors of the next revision to Apple's G5's are starting to get pretty heavy. It's pretty much assured there is going to be a revamp, as they're supposed to get to 3GHz in 7 months or so, so they might want to start bumping a bit. I'm not so sure that there's going to be a big intro in January at the show, as that might be left for other announcements since the iMac, eMac, iBook & others are starting to get really long in the tooth. So perhaps within a month after, or perhaps at the show, who knows.
I'm not really interested in the CPUs per day, although I'll hope they're using a much cooler variant on a smaller process. That's not going to get really interesting until they've hit 2.5 - 2.6GHz or so.
The interesting bit is that the rumors are talking about 4 drive bays, instead of the current two, which would solve one of two of my only beefs with the G5's: only 2 drive bays, and anemic VRAM. They were such obvious omissions to such a powerful box that they raised a lot of eyebrows.
SATA is very cool and all- but there's no way current drives are going to saturate an SATA bus. Where things start to rock is with various RAID levels, especially RAID 5. The G5 is a high end workstation, screaming for RAID 5. I can see where Apple's coming from- they want to push Firewire800, XRAID and the like. But I don't think it's gone over well, not with the size of the current G5. You need at least 3 bays in an enclosure like this. That is somewhat adequate. 4 would be nice. 5 would be cool.
And VRAM? 64megs, and you have to drop $350 for a 128meg card. For the first time in years we have a display system that screams for as much VRAM as it can get, yet they're cutting it back.
And yeah, people always yell back:
"But you only need 32megs for Quartz Extreme!"
Nah. You want as much VRAM as you can possibly get, depending on the resolutions you're pushing and the amount of windows you're using. Especially if other things are using OpenGL, at which point QE is sharing VRAM with them, and slowing down. The more it can keep on the card, the better.
But I'm kind of worried about the drive bays- this could very well turn out to be wishful thinking. Then again, Apple did a turnabout on their digital audio experiment fairly quickly.
Came across this interesting essay. I can imagine lots of people are going to get pretty defensive about it, but whether you disagree or agree with his earlier points they're really a setup for his main points... this "XML, DRM & Open Standards" stuff, like:
There has long been this idea in the industry that using a proprietary format gives you an advantage because you have a captive audience. If they sign up they are stuck with you for ever. But the truth is that a proprietary system goes against the current trends in the industry. If you support open standards your market is everyone, anyone can switch to your product with zero downtime. Buy supporting open standards you also convey a sense that you are able to better connect and interface with multiple organizations, users, and platforms. This is why XML has been such an important technology in recent history.
A friend passed on that Darwin 7.0.1 has support for multi-cpu's and hyperthreading for x86 CPU's... Hmmmm. Interesting, that.
I just found out I'll be heading to Canada on January 1st for four days, which is going to make all of this even more interesting. At least I'll have a few days to decompress a bit and gear up for it once I get in from Houston.
Could be worse, I guess. Canada has some things going for it, Toronto especially. Plus, they all have a habit of talking like pirates, which is just precious. And from what I've been told I shouldn't encounter any french-canadians, which will be lovely.
The only real problem I'm having is that my laptop at some point really needs to go back into Apple for service, and finding a point where that is going to be feasible is the hard part. It's always "In 2 weeks I can do without for a week".
But of course you can't trust that, as sometimes it's 3 days, and sometimes it's a month depending on whatever is going on with them, and it's not like the Apple Store's will give you a loaner.
Moral of the story? You can't depend on current laptops as your primary computers anymore. They just aren't trustworthy, and local service centers can't/won't work on them, they always have to be sent out meaning a 3 day turn-around time at the minimum, which is just a drag.
I haven't had a laptop since my Powerbook 1400c that hasn't had to go in for service, and most of them have had to go back more than once. It's not necessarily just an Apple-thing, as I have friends with Dell's with similar issues (Dell keyboards seem to go bad a lot).
I miss being able to chunk down a bunch of cash, and know I was paying for peace of mind. That really isn't the case anymore. Although the tradeoff might be you can buy 2 laptops for the price of what you would have paid in the past...
I had this forwarded to my inbox a bit ago, and just now got around to it. It's a pretty good laugh, realy. If you ever get asked what a wanker is, this guy is a pretty damn good example. "Wanker Zealot" would prolly be more apt, but I don't think such a classification really exists.
I could say a bunch more, but he does a pretty good job of showing why he's a bit of a joke & embarrassment to the OSX community in general, and virtually no one cares they exist. Thank god his project is completely out of the loop, irrelevant & redundant when it comes to GNU packages thanks to Fink, DarwinPorts/OpenDarwin, Metapkg, & Gentoo.
You know, I'm honestly starting at what point someone wanting to just do Cocoa/Java code is going to be able to not touch Carbon whatsoever. Admittedly there are some things like Quicktime that are going to take a lot of work to get there, and may never get there due to it's massive Carbon legacy... but this is just too damn frustrating.
At the moment I'm trying to get the screen/computer not to sleep while I'm doing a bit of Obj-C code. The only thing I've been able to find has been UpdateSystemActivity, which is only available through Carbon. Grr! Arg! This OS feels too damn schizophrenic sometimes. Almost everything related to power management doesn't seem to be available to Cocoa code.
At any rate, the below code seems to work fine:
OSErr UpdateSystemActivity (
UInt8 activity
);
I'm just annoyed that I'm having to use it.
Hmm. Theoretically, this is supposed to happen... so where the hell are the back patches for this and this and this?
Yeah, they've had some really nasty and stupid bugs going on with 10.3, but really. The userbase of 10.2 is about 1,000 times that of 10.3 at the moment, so it just sorta looks as though they're stalling it out.
Grrr.
MS has been condemned pretty harshly for including security fixes in big honking massive packs that have to be tested thoroughly because you never know what the hell they're going to break... as they should be. Apple's been pretty good about it, when a security exploit has been found in a BSD part of the OS they've generally issued a nice tiny lil patch to apply.
...then along comes 10.2.8, which is a fubar upgrade, royally hosing a bunch of people's machines, to the point where Apple had to pull the patch. The problem? The patch has two security fixes that are needed (ssh & sendmail)! I can only guess Apple thought they were "close" with 10.2.8, and instead of releasing the security fixes decided to "roll them in".
With all the hell MS is getting lately, and this being one of the things MS has been beaten up on pretty badly, it was just plain stupid for Apple to do this. There are still no patches available for those the exploits more than a week later (well, you can compile your own), but luckily with freeBSD the exploit can't execute code with root priveledges... will just crash sshd, which, depending on the situation, could pretty much suck.
Egh. Stupid is as stupid does.
I've got a sneaking suspicion that the odd & confusing choose your color thingy on Apple's website has to do with upcoming faceplates, and they're just getting feedback on what colors people seem to pick in order to avoid another flower power or blue dalmation fiasco.
Could be wrong tho, maybe they're just bored.
I'm starting to feel marginally caught up, but gawd this has really sucked. A vicious storm came through (generating a tiny lil tornado), shearing off the poles at the major power station on the south side. 60,000 people without power, all on the south side... most of the damage was localized within a few blocks in all directions in our neighborhood... meaning our area was in the last 1,000 getting power back.
Luckily I was able to leech net access (and AC) from a friend for a few days off and on to stay marginally in touch and to handle big problems, and to upload/download work. But gawd, it was four days, and another day for net access as the storm had ripped the cable modem line from the house.
The one thing that really came to mind was laptop batteries during the whole experience... often when I'm traveling, it isn't that big of a deal to me. IE, I know when I'm on the train I'll be plugging in in a few hours. Or if I'm on a plane, I can plug in at the hotel once I've reached where I'm going... but I was really trying to eek out every ounce of juice I could in the evenings.
First of all, the "up to 5 hours" thing Apple (and others) spout about their batteries is utter & complete nonsense. I can't believe there hasn't been some sort of lawsuit about it, similar to what happened with CRT display sizes. With those, you could at least see how they were arriving at their size's they gave. With these batteries...
I had my powerbook at the second brightness notch, doing nothing but working with text files & emails. Airport turned off, along with all network connectivity (appletalk, etc). No mp3's playing, nothing. Just answering emails to be sent out later, writing up documentation in Hydra or Mi. All energy saver options at the max. That's it. Occasionally with all the lights out I even worked it down to the very lowest brightness setting, which would have been impossible if there was any other ambient light.
Even with all of that, I was only about to get 4 hours & 30 minutes. Trying to watch a DVD wasn't even an option, although I was able to rip one to the hard drive and get 2 hours worth.
What's the moral of the story? My powerboook is thin as hell. Compared to my friend's P4 laptop, it's positively dainty. I'd easily give up a quarter inch in thickness to have real, usable battery life and to not have my fan become embarrassing loud whenever the ambient temperature in the room is above 78 degrees and the computer is at more than 10% load.
Egh, I'm at least starting to feel like I'm getting the handle on this whole cocoa thing. Some parts of it just really take awhile to sink in. I'm hoping it's one of those "It's hard to get, but once you grok it it all works the same way" type of thing.
So far I'm a little discouraged, but hopeful. Cocoa just seems to be in a large state of transition- its often hard to tell what is threadsafe and what isn't, and doing some basic stuff (such as tableviews) just seems like it could be handled in a much simpler, more thought-out way. It often just feels tacked-on, ie, I'm not getting that feeling I love to get where you feel as though the designers were one step ahead of you in knowing what you'd want and have it right there waiting for you.
I am aware though that much of my frustration is probably due to my own ignorance on the subject, and feeling like I have to hunt & peck for hours in various places to get the fairly simple nugged of information I am after. With cocoa's limited base, it's also harder to research "what would be the easiest way to do x" in it. Grr.
Oh, and drawers in interface builder are often just really weird. It took me a few hours of experimenting to really get a handle on what the different combinations do, and that just peeves me.
Egh, I've gotten a bunch of emails about while I'm so rabid regarding Apple and compilers. Since I have no burning desire to actually fix stuff on this site (uh, like the comments) at the moment so that they aren't so ugly, below is an explanation of why I am so rabid about Apple and compilers.
Plus, it saves me having to email it to 15 people. It's a little long, but fairly easy to read... but after reading it you should have a fairly good understanding of why I'm so annoyed. If I'm wrong on anything, please let me know.
To begin simply...
The compiler is what turns human readable programming languages (c, c++, objective-c, java, etc) into code that the computer can understand... how optimized that code is for the processor architecture and how wisely it makes use of the resources of the machine drastically affect performance- with OSX only more so... with something like the itanium, it's make-or-break.
To give you an idea, Linux users have already had to go through this years ago... they use GCC (an open source compiler) and Linux was feeling the burn compared to windows. Over time it has become heavily optimized for x86 (more-so than any other platform), to the point where it really is a decent compiler for that platform (though they're still improving it).
That said, it's ~30% slower than Intel's commercial compiler for run-time code. In other words, take an x86 app, run it through GCC and then Intel's compiler and the program using Intel's program will often be about 30% faster as it uses the architecture better.
GCC for PowerPC is pretty brain dead at the moment, but Apple has to use it as it's the only thing out there that understands objective-c (cocoa). It goes something like this:
- Apple announces PowerPC. IBM has an AIX compiler, but it's pricey. Around the same time, Apple announced an initiative with symantec to create mrC, a heavily optimized PowerPC compiler. This is a big deal, as Apple is going from CISC to RISC.
- PowerPC launch time comes around, and Apple is way behind with their compiler... it's fast as _hell_, kicking ass and taking names against anything else out there (prolly still) but doesn't quite work correctly and really can't be shipped. Enter metroworks, with a native powerpc compiler who really saves Apple's ass. In spades. Can't be stressed enough.
From this point on, Metroworks (or powerplant) becomes the de-facto IDE for the mac. - Around this time, MrC dies as does the whole Apple/Symantec partnership. A lot of Apple partnership were doing that in these days... ;) Metro's powerplant wasn't the best, but it was reasonably good, although many companies (Apple, Adobe, etc) would use IBM's AIX compiler for a lot of things as they needed the speed boost.
- Enter OSX, and openstep being shoe-horned into OSX. Openstep has _always_ primarily been a CISC operating system, going from moto chips, but by the time Apple picked them up they'd primarily been on x86 for 3-4 years or so (from memory). Large parts of everything are in obj-c, and the only thing that really understands obj-c at this point is GCC as Apple is really the only large user of it (or medium sized, or possibly small).
- GCC is remarkably brain dead when it comes to PowerPC, as well not a lot of open source people use PPC, and _especially_ not many of the uber-elite people I wish I was half as smart as. How brain-dead?
Um, well, pretend for the sake of this that a 1GHz PPC is as fast as 1GHz pentium, both running identical versions of Linux and both using GCC. The 1GHz PPC will actually have the speed of a 700MHz PPC. IE, GCC compiled code for x86 is roughly 30-32% faster. On x86, the same code using intel's compiler is often ~30+% faster. Hence, you take a 30%, or the PPC has to be inherently 30% faster than the same x86 hardware for stuff to feel/run the same using linux.
Apple was able to improve compile times (how long it takes your code to be optimized and turned into stuff the comp can understand) by a factor of 2-3 within one release.
In other words, if GCC was up-to-par with x86 GCC, and you could magically recompile your OS, things would pretty much run code ~30+% faster. With a heavily optimized best-of-breed compiler that really took advantage of the PPC, Apple could probably get 40-70% improvement. I don't know about you, but it pisses me off a little to be running hardware that could be _that_ much faster. Hence, the rabidness.
- The current state is a little muddied, as no one has any real incentive to optimize GCC for PPC except Apple, and IBM to a much smaller extent as AIX is used for much of their higher-end PPC stuff while they push Linux hard they mostly push it on x86 offerings.
Apple sort of has their hands full, as they have to do 2 things:
- Since they're the only ones using obj-c, they're pretty much responsible for the entire side of it. Maintaining it, making sure it works correctly from release to release, improving the language, etc. This also affects (ii), as a compiler really has to evaluate 2 parts- what it thinks you're wanting to do and how to best do it on the system you're targeting. Hence, Apple is the only one really telling the compiler how to interpret cocoa stuff.
- They're pretty much responsible for getting PPC GCC more optimized as there aren't cheap linux boxes out there running PPC, in which case lots more people would be. This includes (i), plus generating better runtime code and also compiled code performance.
There have been rumblings that Apple has hired some of the old mrC team, so we could be in for some real improvements... but whether or not they put the resources behind it to make it shine is unknown, and it'll be a little out.
Of course the compiler problem has been compounded by Apple shipping so many different configurations- do you optimize for the machine to have an L3 cache? Or a 1meg cache? Or 2meg? Dual or single processor?
Intel has learned that lesson, it's one of the big reasons for pushing hyper-threading. If/when Intel starts pushing dually's on the average desktop, or goes to quads, or even multi-core CPU's there are going to be a ton of apps that will use it better due to increased threading to optimize for hyperthreading. Apple seems to decide when to release generations of dual boxes willy-nilly.
Hell, I know I won't believe Apple won't be possibly transitioning to x86 until they optimize the hell out of mach for RISC & not CISC...
This came across my desk last night at about 3am and I just now got a chance to really go through it. It's a comparison of the new 2GHz G5 processor to the older G4 and X86 Xeon's.
For the purposed of comparing the G5 to the xeon, it pretty much fell out as I thought it would considering the compiler issues and the G5's fairly nascent architecture.... especially considering the types of tests being run.
What I found most interesting was this:
Benchmarks from the scalar version of Jet3D are shown in Figure 1 (MFLOPS) and Figure 2 (MFLOPS normalized by MHz). In terms of raw MFLOPS, the 2GHz G5 is about 32% faster than the 2GHz P4, 97% faster than the 1.25GHz G4, 142% faster than the 1GHz G4, and within 1 MFLOP of the 2.66GHz P4.
I really hated Apple's 1.25GHz & 1.42GHz towers, they just weren't good machines compared to the 1GHz machines. Too many tradeoffs just for the MHz, and this sorta shows that off.
If clock speeds were equal, these machines would do a good job of stomping on the Xeon's. There's supposed to be a 3GHz G5 part shipping within a year, but by next July Intel really should be shipping a 4GHz+ part. It'll still narrow the race somewhat, so it should be interesting.
I had the exact same thing happen to me, even up to Apple finally repairing the machine under warranty. Weird.
The battery is now working again at least, but still the trackpad cursor disappears every so often (requiring a restart) which Apple says is a known bug and they will have a fix out for it (this was oh, about a year ago).
It's doing ok, the only real problem I'm having with it now are lots and lots of random kernel panics. Done the peripherals check, clean install, memory check, etc. Nothing helps it. Seems to happen most often on a wake from sleep.
Again, as much as I like macs there are very few people to whom I would actually recommend one to right now.
Been reading as much as I can over the last few days to catch up on some of the Centrino news that has hit this week. Can't help wondering what these things will do to Apple's laptop sales, as the lower power consumption (albiet not so great with G4's) was one of the things that helped them differentiate their notebook designs... even if they've pushed it to the point where I'm pretty sure I can smell myself slowly cooking.
Sucks 2 be me...
Just one of those days... and considering I'm banging this out at 5am, it's actually been more than a day. But I'm almost caught up with all the shite, which means a few hours of catching up on non-critical emails, a few hours of sleep and we're back in business.
I guess it wasn't as bad as it could have been, it was all my time wasted, not anyone elses, but damn has it been annoying as hell. Why did it suck? Both my iBook and tiBook just went wacko yesterday morning, with no real apparent cause...
The Powerbook was really my fault, and while I could rant and rave about OSX just having real issues under heavy load or non-ideal conditions it wouldn't really be fair as I've had similar issues with Linux (ie, log files growing over 2gigs would be one).
Basically I was trying to automate a stupid project, and bringing in a whole bunch of files from a remote server using curl (yeah I know, I couldn't have ssh or ftp access), and specifically using a feature of curl which allows you to pull in sequences of url's and files, rather than listing them all by name.
Since there were a bunch of url's and the files had sequential names... and I'd done it before (with good results), I banged it out right quick. Except that in my haste instead of a [01-1000] i ended up using 2 more zeros than needed... and in multiple URL's this translated into 600,000+ files that curl thought it was supposed to get and output to disk.
Now obviously once curl got past the 1000th file, there simply wasn't a file to get... but that doesn't stop curl, no siree bob. Perhaps if I'd typed it differently it would have just errored out, but I was just using the -O operand tacked to the end along with the function that tells curl to rename the files so I'll know where they came from based on the url.
Since it wasnt able to pull in any data, or rather it got an error message from the server, it simply output the files with the tiny amount of garbage (but named correctly, yay curl!) as it was supposed to. The problem is that OSX uses HFS+ as its native file system, and the smallest block you can have with HFS+ is 4k, so even a 100byte file will take up 4k... and with the amount of files it was trying to pull in that translated into ~5.4gigabytes.
Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, my tiBook has a 30 Gigabyte HD, of which I normally only use 50% of. But since I've been away I had a bunch of my MP3's moved onto it, but it still left me with 5 gigs... generally plenty for swapping and whatever I might need to do while I'm gone. The unique situation that came about was that I had photoshop open and working at the time with some large, layered files and it uses its own VM system and was using a large chunk of the left over space for itself... which led to the HD getting full right quick.
I knew I had a problem when I walked by to check on it and saw an OSX error message saying "You are out of memory, close programs or remove files or (insert scary warning)". Considering I hadn't seen something like that since OS9 on the mac, I got a little wigged and quickly checked the space on the HD... it said there was 250 megs, so I figured the error message was just trying to be pre-emptive and no real damage had been done. Closed everything I was working on, identified what had happened and removed the offending files. Everything seemed hunky dory, so I worked for a bit more, then restarted and was going to run fsck.
That's when the shit sort of hit the fan... I knew there was a problem with OSX where, if the OS ran low on disk space, certain system preferences might get reset, such as the download folder for your web browser, etc. But I'd never encountered it, and never heard of it being this bad.
Rebooted, ran fsck, repaired permissions while I was at it... everything was fine. Logged into aqua, and everything was reset to a virgin install of OSX.
Everything.
I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. Dock was completely reset. Network preferences were completely reset. All my apps lost their preferences (including registration). I can handle having to re-add my icons to the dock, but how the hell Photoshop, Dreamweaver, even something like Yahoo Messenger or iChat went virgin on me is something I just don't quite understand. Incredibly frustrating to say the least, especially since I don't just carry around my install discs or all of my email server settings.
I was able to get ahold of somoene who could get into mine for me after a few hours and give them to me via the phone, so all was not lost and it was pretty painless, if annoying...
...and then the iBook went apeshit.
Started simply enough, I had it hooked up to a firewire burner and was trying to backup some data. Got some errors about part way through, so I figured it was the media, and tried a few more times... giving the hotel some free coasters. Still wasn't working, so I tried to burn an audio CD through iTunes. Same deal- stalled halfway through. At this point I decided to repair permissions, and it found a bunch of stuff... then rebooted and tried to run fsck. Ran for a second and reported an extent error.
Now I was really annoyed, so I hooked it to the tiBook via firewire in target mode and tried to run disk first aid on it (no crossover cable or diskwarrior available, and I forgot that the tiBook's eth01 interface is auto-sensing). No luck, errored out straight quick.
So I had to copy over all the data, and do a reformat/reinstall on it, which is well, annoying as hell as the connection while not modem speed wasn't exactly speedy. Took forever for the OS install, updates and app installs... this plus the tiBook issues were not how I wanted to spend my evening.
The iBook going wacko just didn't make a lot of sense to me- nothing had happened to trigger it, and I'd just run fsck a few days before and it found no errors. Computer would boot fine, work fine, except for the burning.
Both are working fine for the moment, and I know windows has its own share of issues in the same vein... but damn, personal computers are still borderline mentaly retarded children in the grand scheme of technology.
Damn, Slashdot picked this story up and ran with it along with most of the Mac news sites and a whole slew of PC ones. This is at least the 2nd revision of the story, and I don't remember the first getting picked up as readily in the Windows camps... perhaps it's a slow news day. Either way it's really, really bad press for Apple... the only saving grace being that AMD machines weren't included, which in benchmarks I've seen will often beat the P4 on some of the tests by a large margin.
Generally, the comments (both on slashdot and around the web) break down into (paraphrased):
"The tests are loaded against the Mac, because a lot of the apps used don't take advantage of the Mac's dual processors or aren't very optimized for Altivec. So it's a biased, worthless benchmark and not indicative of the mac's speed."
First of all, just be glad the machine in question wasn't a dually-xeon or athlon but rather a single P4.
That said, lets look at the dual processor issue first: The thought here is that the PC is uni-processor, while the mac has two processors, yet for an app to really take advantage of 2 processors it has to be specifically written to do so (threading). This means that you split what your app does into different threads, each of which gets worked on by one of the processors.
For example, if you had a 3D rendering app, one thread (thread A) might handle the interface (where you point and click and stuff gets displayed to the screen) while the other (thread B) might be doing the actual calculations of your 3D model. If it was a single processor machine, thread A might be taking up 10% of your CPU time while thread B takes up 90% of your CPU. If you move to a dually machine, thread A goes to its own processor, leaving thread B to the first... giving you a speedup of ~10%. You wouldn't get quite that much, but I'm trying to keep it simple. Your real gains would be in somehow splitting thread B into separate threads, for example taking each frame that has to be rendered and putting that onto its own processor. Then the speedup might be very dramatic indeed.
However this often either isn't very easily accomplished, due to the calculations that have to be performed not being easily "split" or the time spent to code it not being considered to be cost efficient. For example, many Photoshop/Image filters just can't be split up easily into multiple actions just because of how they work, needing to the the image in its entirety.
Most applications in general just don't take advantage of dual processors, and that's just the way it is- your apps are not magically twice as fast by having them.
Now, the Altivec side of the equation is that the Mac has this really nice SIMD tacked onto its processors which allows it to run certain types of code very, very quickly. SIMD means single instruction, multiple data. The limitations are basically that you don't need double-precision numbers, that you spend the time to write the code, and that the computation you need to do would benefit from SIMD in the first place. If you have something you need to do that is basically calculating the exact same thing in a loop over different data (often pixels) it can be dramatic.
But often it's not, or the limitations of how Altivec works don't make it "precise" enough for the purpose at hand. So in many cases the apps in question just might not be able to use Altivec because it doesn't meet their needs, or they've made the decision that they don't want to put the effort into maintaining different code bases for specific functions. Ie, not all your users may have a G4 processor, so you would have to have multiple code bases just for the mac... and when you might already have two code bases (PC + Mac) you want to keep it as simple as possible.
Don't get me wrong, I really dig dual processor machines... because while multi-tasking and using multiple apps it just makes the whole experience smoother. But they aren't a panacea, and sometimes you just need a really fast processor, not two sort of fast processors. I'm the same way about altivec- it's great if you can use it, but in many cases it either isn't appropriate or the time a developer would need to spend optimizing for it can't be justified for the gains they'd get.
And the bottom line is that this type of benchmark isn't SPEC2000 or something that just measures CPU speed or memory bandwidth: it measures how fast these apps will run on either platform. And if you use those apps for a living, that is a big deal.
"Both platforms are fast enough for anything you might want to do, so which system you use depends on the environment you prefer."
Nyet. You might interpret this from the examples shown, which might be 1:30 vs 1:60, or 1 minute versus two minutes, but you'd be guilty of not seeing the forest for the trees.
For example, if you have a specific function that takes 0.25 seconds on one platform, and 0.5 seconds on another platform, the difference to the user, while 50% slower, won't be a big deal unless you have to do the operation over and over and over.
If you took the same example, but with a much bigger starting point, lets say 10 hours, the first would finish in 5 hours. That's a big deal, and in many cases for those doing video they are dealing times of 1 hour or even 30+.
You can even see this from within something like photoshop... if you're just doing some 72dpi web graphics the difference wouldn't be that pronounced. Start applying massive filters on layered 800 megabyte files in the print world and you'll see it. And before I get "800 megs? What a joke.", it isn't a joke- I used to routinely work with 160-300 meg scans, and know others who work with more every day.
"This is retaliation against Apple for Final Cut Pro."
The thought here is that Adobe is getting into some trouble in some of their core areas, and one of the trouble makers is Apple themselves, and this is their way of pushing back a bit. Back in the day, the mac (or turn-key systems, such as Avids or SGI's) were the machines to use for video editing, and adobe's premiere was the major app along with after effects. WindowsNT went a long way into eating into that market as Apple didn't have a competitive OS at the time, to the point where it's fairly evenly split.
Apple, with Final Cut Pro has gone a long way into destroying premiere as a video editing solution on the Mac, and with Final Cut Express, Apple is eating into any low-end left. In all honesty, I barely even hear Premiere mentioned anymore. It's all Final Cut Pro, or Final Cut Pro + After Effects which is still a big app, but with Apple's purchase of Shake even that market might be going away.
So on the mac, Adobe's video products are endangered due to other offerings, but it isn't so dire on the PC side of the camp, hence they are "pushing" users of their software over to it as Final Cut Pro and other Apple apps only run on Apple's machines.
In all honesty, I'd have to believe that Adobe (and many other developers) would love to see the Mac just die away in some ways: both because Apple makes it a bit difficult when they are competing directly against you, and that having one OS to develop for and support (windows) makes things a lot easier.
"Anyone who isn't living under a technological rock or RDF field knows that PC's have surpassed macs in raw speed for most types of computations quite a bit ago, and this type of thing only nails it home. I hope it pushes Apple to either do something drastic to even the disparity or surpass it sooner rather than later."
Hard to find any fault in that one.
There a bunch of information floating around the web at the moment about Apple's iBooks and Powerbooks having some real reliability issues. Much is referenced, but from what I can gather the majors are: battery issues, dying screens, heat, dying ports, breaking components and big time glitches from within OSX (kernel panics, etc) that perhaps point to the build being shipped not being fully compatible with the new models.
It pretty much matches with my experiences, and is a little depressing. Mac's are considered to be a luxury item, and Jobs' has even compared them to luxury car makers... If the gearshift nob of your neon falls off, well, they have cheap components and you would be pretty annoyed. If the gearshift nob of your jaguar breaks off, you feel a little ripped off.
Some mac users out there poo-poo this type of information, saying things like "Mine works just fine." which is a little short-sighted. I'm in the camp that thinks their obviously real problems that are not helping the platform whatsoever. Then again, I use a lot of mac hardware (and have seen a lot of the issues mentioend above) and try to keep in touch with what's going on with it, not just with mine.
Quite honestly, while I love macs there just isn't a single model I can recommend right now to someone who is interested in the platform and wants something that is fast, reliable and not overly pricey. That disturbs me, and I have a feeling it might show up in Apple's upcoming quarterly figures.
Adobe has an article on their website now, advocating PC's over Mac's for their products, due to the PC having an impressive speed advantage over the Mac's.
You just know they're going to get ~5,000 emails threatening to boycott them, and while I can't fault the benchmarks themselves, especially with the particular applications used, for the life of me I can't imagine why adobe would post it.
Sure, I can see that they might often get asked the question about which platform one should choose by those buying their products... but generally in those types of cases one would be pretty mum, saying things like "Our software works great on both platforms." to avoid pissing either platform's rabid fan base off.
I dunno, I'm still in shock after using the 300MHz iBook running OS9 and Outlook Express a few days ago, compared to my 667 Powerbook sitting right next to it running 10.2.4. I honestly couldn't believe just how fast it was doing the simple things, like opening an email message.
In Outlook for OS9 on a 300MHz machine with 4 megs of VRAM it was instantaneous, by which I mean the message opened and displayed before the enter key had even sprung back. It's far from instantaneous in either Apple's Mail or Entourage in OSX on my 667MHz Powerbook with 16megs of VRAM, to the point where I can't view stuff unless its in the preview pane.
Way to go Apple, taking a computer that is an order of magnitude faster than a model years older, and made it an order of magnitude slower than the older model for simple, basic things, all with one OS update. Heh, so maybe I'm a little biased at the moment...
I dunno, a ton of Apple's professional users are at a major crossroads due to the switch to OSX and the schism it has caused, and maybe companies like Adobe doing this will help accelerate whatever Apple has planned.
I have to admit though I'm honestly worried at this point, as a 1.8GHz PPC 970 just won't cut it, and a dually 1.8GHz machine would just let it help keep up for awhile... not the order of magnitude people need or want. The "If we build it, they will come" mentality Apple is prone just might not be cutting it anymore.
In the past I've been annoyed and pissed off about the speed and component issues with OSX and Apple's hardware, but now I'm just plain worried.
Spent most of today installing Jaguar onto a 300MHz tangerine iBook as a favor to a friend, who had been running OS9. She'd been holding off on upgrading until they could get the Office vX suite cheap, and since they were able to pick it up for $5 from their uni and I was in the area, we set to it.
Took a lot longer than I anticipated, even though we had a high speed connection for updates... mostly because of just how slow the CD drive is in that machine, and the speed of the disk and subsystem in general.
Some observations:
- Memorable Design
The toilet-seat iBook design is just much more memorable compared to Apple's current designs, IMHO. There's a feeling of having little aestetics throughout it for the sake of aesthetics, that don't hurt functionality whatsoever (ok, size could be one thing). Just a guess, but the design of this thing will be something people remember 10 years now, like the Blackbird or Wallstreet Powerbooks, whereas the current snow-iBook and iMac will most likely fade from memory. - Forward-thinking components
I honestly don't know what the hell Apple was smoking when they not only said these machines were made for OSX back when they sold them, when you consider the bus/component speed and the resolution. The video card is a joke, as well as the bus speed... The CPU with enough RAM actually isn't too bad for OSX, but the other parts of it just drag down performance. - 800x600
OSX is barely usable at any resolution under 1024x768, and with the iBook's 800x600 resolution, and very poor graphics performance (ie, don't try hiding/unhiding the dock) it makes for a painful experience. There's just so much screen real estate wasted it sort of rubs me the wrong way. Even in the setup screens for OSX, or the preference panes, they actually go off the screen or run under the dock no matter how small it is. Most of Apple's notebooks still ship with very low resolutions compared to PC's, and PC's don't need the resolution nearly as much as Mac users do... Apple's margin's are high enough that it can increase the resolutions to match the PC makers, as it's a bit sad right now. - Standard Formats
Way too much of my time was spent dealing with their legacy email, which was in Outlook Express. It's a good app, but getting anything out out of it in a format that other mail readers on OSX could deal with was an exercise I'm just not in the mood to relate. Note to self- when at all possible, avoid proprietary solutions or formats. They make dealing with legacy data/solutions a bitch. - Severe stability issues are worrisome
Two machines, both running 10.2.4 were connected via a hub for file sharing. Worked like a charm, until everything was done copying to the host machine and I shut down file sharing. Got the standard message "xxx will shut down in xxx minutes" goes fine. Cept the host machine went bonkers- finder hung with 100% usage, so I relaunched it. Hung on relaunch, then hung up the dock and froze the whole screen... i was able to SSH into the machine and kill of processes but it wasn't to helpful considering the GUI had gone all wacko, and all my work was within GUI apps. Not a happy camper. No offense, but a server disconnecting should not hang the client machine... it's not the first time it's happened. - Beer is good
I like wine. I like stimulating conversation. I like languid conversation. I like to partake of them together... but a situation like this calls for Beer. Beer not only makes the sitting around waiting while the HD drones during installation/copying tolerable, but with the right people actually allows it to pass tolerable and become enjoyable. Wouldn't have been with wine- situation called for beer.
Off again tomorrow morning, one more stop and I'm on a flight home... Waiting for a server to update, then catching up on email and then catching up on sleep. I talked to a server admin once who had never actually admin'd a server remotely. Half the servers I work on I've never actually seen... foreign to me.
Articles like this in the press, and the fact that Apple's stock is down while the rest of the market is actually up are giving the feeling that Apple's addition of Al Gore to their board of directors probably isn't what Wall Street was looking for after voting Apple's board as one of, if not the worst boards of a public company.
Seems to be a pretty resounding "WTF?" all around...
Derrick Story writes in his blog on oreillynet about USB 2.0 probably not making an appearance on the mac any time soon. I've talked on some lists about this, as I would have thought Apple would have already had it if they were going to any time soon. Some people think this will help boost the firewire market and actually make USB 2.0 against firewire, and that on the basis of merit firewire will stomp all over USB.
Unfortunately merit often has nothing to do with one technology winning over the other, and if you are stuck with the technology that lost you're screwed. This is really, really not a good thing for mac users, or for Apple. Here's why:
USB 1.1 is a decent protocol, but dead slow. It just wasn't really made for a lot of the needs that are out there right now, such as digital cameras or hard drives. Apple has a technology out there called "firewire" which is a very good solution for peripherals that need the faster speeds, but isn't suited for things like mice when you compare it to USB1.1. It's pretty much agreed that firewire is architecturally the better system, yet the vast majority of peripherals are USB-based, not firewire, even when they would be much better served by firewire.
You can boil down the reasons why into: apple scared off adopters early with licensing issues, intel's chipsets make USB practically ubiquitous now so 3rd parties know that users buying their products will almost certainly have USB but not firewire, implementing USB chipsets/licensing is dirt cheap compared to firewire.
Nothing has really changed from the above- USB still has all of those advantages, plus speed approaching firewire and backwards compatibility with USB1.
Firewire will always be a bit faster than USB2, but will USB2 be fast enough? In almost all cases, yeah. First, the mac market is irrelevant. It just doesn't factor into the manufacturer's minds, it's much too small. So we have to look at how the PC user uses peripherals, and what you find is that while Apple's computers have these very tight and un-upgradeable designs compared to PC users.
If a PC user wants to add a hard drive to their box, most often they have extra slots in their mini-atx form factor and just slap one in whereas a mac user has to go out and buy an external firewire hard drive for their iMac. Since a USB1 hard drive is painful to experience due to the speed of the interface, and since mac users often can't add extra internal drives they end up buying firewire drives which just usually aren't necessary for the PC.
So the vast majority of USB2-targeted peripherals will be things like digital cameras, scanners, cd burners, webcams, printers, high-capacity MP3 players and camcorders.
All the items I just mentioned are either constrained by USB1, and need something faster, but don't need the capabilities of firewire and USB2 will do. There are even a bunch of places where firewire was chosen simply because USB1 wasn't fast enough but now will probably switch to USB2...
The market for USB2 drives is exploding- they're pretty much everywhere now, and fairly soon the low and mid-range digital cameras, scanners, burners and printers will be shipping as USB2, not USB1 or firewire. Without USB2 support on the mac, built-in, mac users will be forced to either pay for "mac versions" which are always much more expensive or they'll have to make sure they have compatible drivers and buy external cards.
Since many macs don't have PCI slots or any way to upgrade anymore they'll just end up using USB2 products hooked up to USB1 ports at a fraction of the speed. I can of course see why Apple wants to not push a competitors technology, but it seems to be a case where they've blown it early in the race and they can either try to ride the wave of USB2 and let firewire slip into its niche or go through a long struggle, hurting their users all the way.
Something seems to be seriously wrong with these things, I've gone through four so far and the machine is barely a year old. Checking through various sites shows that I'm not the only one... this seems to be specifically related to the dual-USB iBooks, as my Powerbook and older iBook haven't had issues.
The older toilet-seat iBook has gotten a new battery, but it was after a few years and I considered it to be tolerable. Ie, here's the current situation. iBook battery stops holding charge after 3 months or so, and only allows something like 15-30 minutes of charge. Go through all trouble-shooting steps, then call Apple. Batteries aren't covered under AppleCare (just the initial, 90 day warranty) but since this is one I've bought new from them they say they'll send out another one. A week and a half later it hasn't showed, so I call back, to be told they are out of them (backordered) and it could be another few days or few weeks.
It really sucks- this isn't some special component, just a stupid battery. How they can be out of batteries for products they have on the shelves of their stores and are actively selling is beyond me. So, for the next few days to the next few weeks, my portable computer is decidedly non-portable again.
I honestly wouldn't recommend these current iBook's to anyone as too many people are having problems... and the 12" powerbook is also having a lot of problems, and the 17" powerbook isn't available yet. Which leaves only current stock of the 15" powerbooks as an apple laptop that has hada bunch of the kinks worked out and it is hotter than hell on your lap and still has the fan issues which can drive me batty on mine (revC 667), although the fan issue is better than the revB 667.
I came across this article today at Wired, which talks about a Major doing intelligence planning in the desert... he claims he has the only one...
Mr. Steinberg writes here about just how cheap Apple's xServe Servers are compared to the competition. Unfortunately it reads like a lot of his articles, in that seems as though he is reading straight from the PR sheet and is only hired to generate some pro/con website traffic. Specifically...
Aaaaaw yeah.
Classic isn't going to go down without a fight, and even if you aren't using it it wants to let you know its still there...
