Here are the web links I’ve found for 15 May 2008, posted automatically.
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Apple is now the number one music retailer in the US, surpassing Wal-Mart in January 2008. Apple now sells 19% of all recorded music in the US, Wal-Mart 15%, Best Buy 13% and Amazon 6%. Hat-tip to Daring Fireball.
I just found this while cleaning up the office: the start-up disc for Apple’s Hard Disk 20 from 1985.
This was the first hard drive for the then-new Macintosh. My beloved Fat Mac — “Fat” because it came with 512k RAM, not the original 128K — had two 800kB 400kB 3.5-inch floppies, one of which held the operating system
So this drive extended my data storage from under 1MB half a megabyte to a gargantuan 20MB. I was in heaven!
Later that year, a legal settlement from a traffic accident provided the funds for the other cool tool for geeks: the original Apple LaserWriter printer. I remember being extremely chuffed because it was on special: marked down from the list price of AUD$10k to a mere $7.7k
Yes, seven thousand dollars! In 1985 money!
This was the desktop publishing revolution!
Everyone — simple everyone — wanted to look at the glorious 300dpi print quality. And because I’d gotten hold of JustText, a code-based tool for professional typesetting, I could pass raw PostScript commands through to the printer and do complex layouts. TAFE offered me a job on the spot — which I declined.
It all seems so passé now…
This disc looks in pretty good condition. I wonder if it still works? Anyone got the hardware?
So last week Apple announced new products. Yawn. The Cult of Apple worshipped their God, and millions of words were written praising His Wisdom. However the most interesting comment I’ve read so far was about the political content of Steve Jobs’ presentation.
Alastair Rankine writes that the Macworld Keynote has moved from slick-but-reality-distorted marketing into the realms of straight-out entertainment, and then criticises Randy Newman’s performance. Not because it was crap (which, being Randy Newman, is inevitable), but because it was political.
Criticism of the Bush administration is something I obviously have a lot of time for. But is it suitable for a consumer product launch? …
Mix politics with business and you take a risk with a relatively small upside but a big downside. If your politics match mine, we are no more likely to do business together than before we knew each other’s positions. But if our politics disagree, this difference becomes a barrier that we each have to overcome in order to do business together.
I’m not arguing for censorship or anything. I’m just saying that the separation of politics and business is crucial for the success of both.
I disagree.
Business is about making money, yes, but sometimes I think it’s wrong to “leave politics at the door”. In fact, is it even possible?
The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has a technology review of 2008, including:
September
Apple’s second generation 3g iPhone goes on sale. This time, as well as signing up to Apple’s network partner, customers have to bring a DNA sample to enter on the company database before the phone can be activated. “We’re just trying to make sure iPhone users all feel part of the Apple family,” a spokesman explains.
October
Nokia brings out its latest smartphone, the N99. As well as featuring music, live television, a manicure set and a device for getting stones out of horse’s shoes, it offers an ice-cream cornet with a chocolate flake. “And, unlike, the new 3g iPhone,” a spokesman explains, “it is 4g, making the mobile internet work properly for the first time.”
Hat tip to Memex 1.1.
They must put something in the water at places like Google and Apple.
I mean, isolating everyone at a “campus” even to the point where they only eat with each other is one of the classic cult-creation techniques. And both have a personality cult thing going with Steve Jobs and Larry Page and Sergey Brin
But check this Google software engineer gushing over the chance to do menial work in the kitchen:
How often do you get to cook fine cuisine for 800 people — especially while learning from some of the finest chefs in the business? Our Google chefs offer a limited number of culinary internships, and I was lucky enough to win one. So one fine Thursday morning I got to spend 4 hours in the Google kitchens working with, and learning from, our amazing culinary engineers.
Like so many software people, Dave MacLachlan seems amazed that other professionals actually have systems too, and know what they’re doing.
OK, so this morning I was going to write a rebuttal to Zern’s essay Dog food, exploding laptops and chlorine dioxide, but I got distracted by these wonderful spoofs of the Mac vs PC adverts.
There’s several, including that one about performance, plus others on security, gaming, upgrading, networking and portability. And if you watch any of them on YouTube, you’ll soon see links to other people’s efforts along the same lines.
Oh well, there’s 10 minutes of our lives we won’t get back…
An “amusing trick” for owners of the over-hyped iPhone. If you take photos of your friends against some glass (or with a scanner) and make that their contact photo in your iPhone, then when they call it’ll look like they’re trapped in your phone! Thanks to The Apple Blog for the pointer.
“A global electronic mall is under construction,” enthuses this wonderful promotional video from 1994 extolling the virtues of the Internet. “Come, take a look at the future we can build together,” says Digital Equipment Corporation, once one of the world’s most important computer companies.
Here [on the Internet], the smallest of companies can search and shop on a global scale for the best resources and products at the best prices. Here those same small companies can market their own abilities and products in a global marketplace. This means a new array of risks and opportunities. In the future you’ll be forced to compete with distant companies you’ve never encountered before. And you’ll be able to expand to new markets at low cost.
Only 13 years on, watching this video is already a retro experience. The grey pages of the Mosaic web browser were state of the art in 1994 — pictures as well as text! 1994 is still a year before the Internet exploded into popular awareness. A year before Netscape and Yahoo! and Amazon.com and Windows 95. A year before I was headhunted to move to Sydney to play in the dot.com boom.
For me, there’s two levels of nostalgia in his video — nostalgia for the Internet before it really did become that “shopping mall”, and nostalgia for Digital.
Digital Equipment Corporation made the most popular scientific computers from the late 1960s. The PDP-10 mainframe (later DECsystem-10) was at the heart of every decent computing science department in the 70s.
But what every programmer wanted was the coolest toy of all, the PDP-11 minicomputer. From a programmers point of view it was well-engineered, it was designed for mass production — and it just looked so goddam cool.
I never encountered a PDP-11 in real life, so I never saw those glorious purple buttons with my own eyes. But at university I did play with its successor, the VAX-11 — essentially a souped-up PDP-11 with integrated circuits instead of transistors — and soon understood why programmers thought it was so good. It just worked.
The BSD Unix operating system which underpinned the Internet and which inspired Linux was first written for PDP-11s and Vaxen (the accepted plural of “VAX”). They inspired the design of Motorola’s microprocessors — clean and simple to program — which were used by Apple’s early machines right through to only two years ago. Much cleaner and more logical than the clunky Intel processors which powered IBM’s PC and its clones.
Digital made computers designed by programmers for programmers — it was as simple as that.
“Digital is here already as a leader in the field,” boasts the video. But alas Digital is no more. “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home,” said Digital’s founder, Ken Olsen. But he was wrong. The minicomputer market disappeared as the PC revolution took hold. Digital was bought out by Compaq, who in turn were bought out by HP.
Look at that video a couple of times. Remember, that’s only 13 years ago. Now look at the Internet available right in front of you now — and try to imagine what it’ll all be like in another 13 years.
Thanks to Memex 1.1 for the pointer and further observations.
If you’re in Sydney or Melbourne, there’s an opportunity to recycle your dead computers this month. Of course Apple has organised this after scathing criticism of their environmental record, but it will help reduce Australia’s mountain of computer waste.
I wasn’t going to write anything about Apple’s new iPhone, because I knew it’d be analyzed to death pretty much everywhere else. But this blog posting (picture below) sums it up so nicely I just have to tell you.
Thanks to Hugh MacLeod for the pointer — and for linking to the more important news.
When it comes to security, every desktop computer operating system is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because any software you run has the same permissions that you do. Anything you can do, they can do too — whether you want that or not.
Speaking at the AusCERT conference on Monday, Ivan Krstic, director of security architecture for the One Laptop per Child project, says the computing industry relies on “utterly obsolete concepts and assumptions” and has “massively failed when it comes to desktop security”.
The way modern desktop security works is by relying on the user to make informed and sensible choices on things they don’t understand.
The early personal firewall software was a classic example:
A dialogue would pop up and say ‘Hi, we’ve intercepted this packet with this TCP sequence number and these flags set, and SYN and FIN are both on, and here are the destination ports and the source ports and here is a hex dump of the packet. Allow or deny? What do you think?’. Who is that protecting? It’s protecting me, but I don’t need that kind of protection in the first place.
The Apple Blog was sarcastic when they reported Krstic’s speech — I suspect because arrogant OS X users think security issues don’t apply to them — so I posted a response…
Apple has responded to being listed as the worst PC manufacturer from an environmental standpoint, releasing a long blog-like piece called A Greener Apple. Interestingly, Apple wasn’t listed as worst because their practices were necessarily the worst, but because their cult of secrecy meant that they didn’t talk about what they were doing. Further commentary at The Apple Blog.
Thanks to the ever-observant people at Signal vs Noise, I can draw your attention to Worth1000.com’s competition for fake designs for non-existent Apple products.
I can’t be the only one with infantile humour, because there’s lots of toilet-themed entries — though for my money this is the best.
Doesn’t anyone else think “Ahem, conflict of interest!” when the new chair of the federal government’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Advisory Board is one Steve Vamos, MD of Microsoft Australia? Especially when there’s no “community” representation whatsoever.
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