I've been watching His Stevenesses Keynotes for a while now. In the good old days you could watch them streamed live, but with progress (sarcasm) you can't do that anymore. I'm pretty jaded, a lot of stuff seems like this. My old Black 250 Mhz PPC running system 8 could do do things I still can't do on my Intel iMac. Well not easily anyway. What do I want to see from this years Macworld? Well actually I would like to see iWork become as useful as say Office. If they are going to bring out a sub-notebook thingy it had better be closer in size to an iPhone than 12" iBook, and it would need to run OS X (of course). I do NOT want to hear more about the frigging iPhone but I know Steve is going to make that SDK sound like it will solve all my problems even though I can't buy an iPhone in NZ yet. Well we'll see soon enough... I'm off to bed now so that I can at least have a shot against Steve's Reality Distortion Field.
Cisco, while arguably the first company to market with a phone called iPhone, now looks like it will have to defend their use of the branding after merely placing iPhone stickers on the outside of its shrink-wrapped packaging.
Apple has trademarked the iPhone name widely outside the U.S. including New Zealand. Apple are planning to respond to Cisco's legal challenge regarding the use of the iPhone name on 21st of Feb. 2007.
There is some in depth analysis of the iPhone at: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/Archive.html Before Jobs revealed the iPhone at Macworld, Apple had to keep secrets from multiple companies and its own employees for 30 months. Apple also sued bloggers during this period who discussed Asteroid (AppleTV?). This cost Apple $700,000 recently when a Santa Clara County Court ordered Apple to pay AppleInsider.com and PowerPage.org $700,000 Samsung has revealed its own Smart F700 mobile phone which has a large touch-screen and a slide-out key pad.
The phone can also access the Internet, play music, take pictures, show videos, handle e-mail and share photos, said Samsung, the world's third-largest manufacturer of mobile phone handsets. Last month, rival LG Electronics Co. announced its own touch-screen mobile phone, the KE850 Prada. Produced in partnership with the Italian fashion brand, is to go on sale in late February for $780 in Britain, France, Germany and Italy.
It looks like we are losing our iSight thanks to the worlwide RoHS (Removal of Hazardous Substances) directive. The substances in question include mercury, lead, cadmium, chromium VI and brominated flame retardants. Apple's iSight Firewire Camera, AirPort Base Station With Modem, AirPort Base Station Power Over Ethernet & Antenna, iPod shuffle External Battery Pack, and all versions of the eMac were affected and are no longer being produced.
Norway's consumer ombudsman has told Apple it must open access to its music download system by October 1 or face legal action. Pressure from many other European countries is building, with organisations from Germany, France, Finland and Norway this week agreeing on a joint position against iTunes. They argue that Apple uses DRM to limit consumers' free use of songs bought on iTunes, including the ability to copy and transfer songs to other users and other MP3 devices besides the Apple iPod. The growing pressures against Apple may have caused Steve Jobs to go public with his open letter "Some Thoughts about Music" in which he says that Apple would sell DRM-free music in a in a heartbeat but cannot. Apple has also concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies due to it barely being able to stem the reverse engineering and subsequent "breaking" of DRM. The “big four” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI control the distribution of over 70% of the world’s music. Music purchased from Microsoft’s Zune store will only play on Zune players; music purchased from Sony’s Connect store will only play on Sony’s players; and music purchased from Apple’s iTunes store will only play on iPods. After dividing the amount of music on an average ipod by the average amount sold from the iTunes Store Steve concluded that only 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and is protected with DRM. In 2006 less than 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold DRM-free by the music companies themselves.
DVD Jon (the original DRM reverse engineer) has responded to Steve Jobs on his blog. Johansen notes that Apple could (at least in theory) swiftly remove FairPlay from any track from which a content owner declines DRM if it so wishes.
The man behind the MoKB (Month of Kernel Bugs) Kevin Finisterre of Digital Munition is on a month-long "Month of Apple Bugs" project to expose unpatched Mac OS X and Apple application vulnerabilities. Finisterre is a very well-respected researcher whose motivation for the project was: "Right now, many OS X users still think their system is bulletproof. They need a dose of reality." Was this an attack, revenge, conspiracy or some kind of evil plot against Apple and the users of Apple products? "Not at all, some of us use OS X on a daily basis. Getting problems solved makes that use a bit more safe each day, for everyone else. Flaws exist, with and without people disclosing them.said Finisterre. Apple has already released a Security Update 2007-02 which squashes four of the security issues raised by the Month of Apple Bugs project.
Apple is planing retail stores in Australia, one at the base of Sydney sky-rise building at the corner of King and George streets in Sydney. The project is estimated to cost over $15 million complete with a suspended glowing 10-foot Apple logo.
Another Apple flagship store is proposed for Melbourne's Fun Factory site which calls for the demolition of the historic but under-utilized Fun Factory building on the corner of Toorak Road and Chapel Street in South Yarra. A cubed-shaped Apple store, reminiscent of the company's flagship location in San Francisco, would consume the largest chunk of space within the new retail plaza. Apple is also expected to open stores in Italy, Scotland, France, and Germany to add to the 170 stores it has already in U.S., Canada, U.K. and Japan.
The Southern Cross Data Cable connecting New Zealand to Australia and the US is to be substantially upgraded. A tender is expected to be issued in March to lift the cable's capacity from 240GB per second to 1.2TB per second by installing new equipment in the 10 cable stations around the Pacific. The project will use dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology to achieve the speed boost.
There's a rumour Apple may hold a Special Event on February 20 to introduce Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07 as well as updated Mac. Apple has also set the dates for the 2007 WorldWide Developers Conference for June 11-15 in San Francisco.
I bemoaned Safari's default of dragging text to the desktop as a clipping rather than creating a .rtf document as explorer did. The beauty of explorers way was that any URL's stayed alive. Well guess what they're alive in that very plain text clipping also! Try this: Open TextEdit, from the Format menu choose Make Rich Text, drag an old clipping from the web into the document, Boom! not only are all the original live clickable links in there but also all of the web graphics that were selected when you dragged the original clipping to the desktop! I'm in love again... sigh.
Once a month I contribute to the Apple User Group of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand) a magazine column entitled "AppleSoup". I have been a member of the club for many years and have been a past President. The club finished the year in great shape an believe it or not, I won the biggest raffle of the year and first prize was Video iPod! This co-incided nicely with the arrival of the iTunes Music Store in New Zealand, someting we have waited paitiently for. Below is my contribution to the last AppleSoup column for the year.
Happy Christmas everyone, especially Mac users...
Applesoup Nov06 - Bart Hanson
Apple has updated the MacBook Pro to include the Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Rumours are that a behemoth PowerMac is also being readied. An Apple with 8 cores may be the big news for MWSF in January. It may be just the thing to have too, when Adobe finally releases Creative Suite 3.0 The new PowerMac will most likely house two of Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 series "Clovertown" chips. The "iTV" Television interface is almost a certainty for Steve's Keynote and in another sign the iPhone is near, Apple has won a patent for speech-recognition technology that experts say paves the way for the new device. The iPhone could also be announced at the Macworld Expo on January 8th.
There are two different technologies for mobile phones in the world. CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) is mainly used in the U.S. and Canada and is the technology Telecom uses. Although giving better penetration into buildings it does not offer nearly the same global roaming capability as GSM - Global System for Mobiles based on TDMA ( Time Division Multiple Access). Vodafone use GSM. Whether or not any of the above rumours come to "fruition" (get it?) there's still the whole world of iTunes/iPod to consider. A patent describes using an external drive (like an iPod) as a "Home away from Home" allowing users to log into their Home user anywhere and on returning home, synchronizing any changes you've made to your files with File Sync, which can automatically update any offline changes made to your home directory. Less enthusiasm is being shown for a possible alliance between Walmart and Apple whereby Walmart would sell digital download ‘coupons’ for iTunes music and video content. There are some folks still waiting for a fullscreen video iPod, less likely though is a touch-screen iPod, going by the number of greasy fingered bloggers out there.
On the www.pcmag.com website I saw large paid-for adverts with links to Apples new "I'm a Mac I'm a PC" series of adverts. It made me feel that "the rest of us" have arrived, seeing it in PC territory like that, although it looks as though this series of adverts will see changes with Apple dropping "I'm a Mac" guy, Justin Long. Journalist/humorist John Hodgman, will stay on however, for the next round.
MacAddict magazine is to be re-branded as MacILife The new name implies how Apple fits into our digital lifestyles. The publishing industry around computer "stuff," particularly Mac "stuff," has been struggling to keep up with original and interesting content published instantly on the Internet. RIP MacAddict.
Google has bought the popular video sharing site YouTube for $1.65 Billion Dollars! Traffic statistics show YouTube had two and a half times more hits than Google Video back in August 2006, and more than four times the visits in September 2006. YouTube will keep its name and will continue to operate independently from Google. It was always a mystery how YouTube paid for its Bandwidth and with threats of lawsuits from the likes of Time Warner Music the time to sell YouTube must have seemed just right.
GNU-Linux Microsoft and Novell have formed an unholy alliance whereby Microsoft pays Novell US$440 million and Novell pay Microsoft US$40 million in a patents cross-licencing deal than observers say is primarily designed to create FUD and to eventually topple RedHat, currently the largest Linux vendor.
Richard Stallman is a weird 53 year old anticorporate crusader attempting to popularize GNU and "his" new open source licence agreement, the so called GPL or 'General Public Licence'. Red Hat programmer Ulrich Drepper stated, 'don't trust this person'. Stallman's new licence puts a ban on anything that can protect or enforce copyright, patent, or other rights - this despite Stallman greedily hanging onto the copyrights he's duped from open source developers over the years. http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/09/11feature2.html
Windows Vista has gone "gold master" to use an old fashioned term. DVD's of Vista are currently being mass-produced to be ready for a worldwide release in January. ALT+TAB the Windows way of switching between application, is now called Windows Flip. As each program is tabbed to, a view of the application icon and the active window of that application, allowing you to see what's going on in the application before switching. As a alternative to Expose on the Mac, Microsoft has Flip3D. It's a utility which works like a rolodex, allowing the user to flip through the windows until they find the one they're looking for. Flip3D is a second-rate copy of Expose and doesn't have the power or elegance of Exposé to be useful. Vista also introduces a new class of utilities called Gadgets which are a more direct copy of Widgets on Mac OS X.
Microsoft plans to charge and arm and a leg to allow users of Apple Computer's Intel Macs to run Vista operating system under virtualization. I reckon it would mean sacrificing your brain as well but digress... In its licensing terms Microsoft has spelled out that users of Vista Home Premium and Vista Home Basic "may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system." Instead, users must purchase a Vista Business or Vista Ultimate license, in order to emulate the Windows environment and "If you do so, you may not play or access content or use applications protected by any Microsoft digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other Microsoft rights management services or use BitLocker." Mac users wanting to run Vista, are being advised by Apple to use Parallels Desktop, who advocate it even over Boot Camp, and Parallels comes with a new Installation Assistant built-in tool which automates the installation of XP and Vista and makes even easier than installation on a PC.
Following on from last months Applesoup column, there are strong indications that Telecom NZ will sacrifice CEO Teressa Gattung. Hell, I would expect to be sacrificed too if it was me who told my customers that they were being deliberately misled, as Teressa did. see this parody on one of Telecom's own TV adverts:
The government may also split Telecom into three parts, retail, wholesale and network after the continued monopolistic pricing and stunted "unlimited" speeds experienced recently. (Late breaking news, the Government has "unbundled" Telecom's monopoly over the "network" so now third party providers may access the physical network too, Yay!".)
Email Private? An ex AT&T employee has turned whistle-blower in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program. You can read about it at: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70908-0.html Of course New Zealand is part of ECHELON which is designed and coordinated by the NSA but operating out of Waihopai right here in the South Island. Every minute of every day, the system can scan three million email messages in real time. http://www.cndyorks.gn.apc.org/yspace/articles/echelon20.htm
A report surfaced recently of the muslim community being offended by Apple's cube store on Fifth Avenue, New York due to the Cube's resemblance to the Ka'bah (The House of Abraham). The muslim community responded soon afterward with accusations that it was just a random post on a random website and that people exploited it for for political purposes. One wag wrote in a blog entry that he was a Satanist, and is "outraged at the shape of the pentagon which totally abuses the five-sided shape". Another, a muslim wrote "it’s kind of cool that it does resemble the Kaaba if anything imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". Make up your own mind! Happy Christmas fanboys and fangirls. Good luck in the Christmas card competition!
In his column A Whole New Ball Game Robert Cringley writes the last paragraph triumphantly (as though all the preceding text in the column backs it up...) [quote from Cringely column] I predict that Apple will settle on 64-bit Intel processors ASAP (with FireWire 800 please), and at that time will announce a product similar to Boot Camp to allow OS X to run on bog-standard 32-bit PC hardware, turning the Boot Camp relationship on its head and trying to sell $99 copies of OS X to 100 million or so Windows owners. That's the point when, as Koppy used to write, the game turns. [end quote]
I think that releasing OSX for PC may be ultra lucrative in the short term and it may boost some peoples ego's "na,na, na, nanana we've got the best OS!" but it is VERY shortsighted. Apple has already thrown down the gauntlet to Microsoft without needing to release OSX for PC. PC users can now buy a Mac (Apple is a HARDWARE company that ALSO writes great SOFTWARE) and try out OSX whenever Windows gets boring or tiring (often). With Apple's next OS release (Leopard MacOS 10.5) and Parallels users will probably be able to run Vista and OS X concurrently. I'd bet on OS X becoming peoples preferred OS, (it just works! to borrow a Microsoft marketing term). If OS X is released to run on generic PC's Apple then becomes just like Microsoft, with multi-megabucks, predominantly a software company, and it will have all the hassles of disparate hardware and it will attract all of the poisoned arrows that being BIG brings. Let us all hope that Apple never becomes the biggest, after all, it's already the best. "What would it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?".
Well, my boss just got me a beautiful new iBook (14 inch, Superdrive). Would I put myself through this for a $50 one? I don't think so. I'm the sort who would prefer to pay $500, without the agro.
The name of my blog is "Aquatic" It is meant to be a play on the word "Aqua" The Dictionary at www.dictionary.com tells me that aqua is:
aq·ua
Water. An aqueous solution. A light bluish green to light greenish blue
But... I know better, it's actually Apple's user interface for Mac OS X, using color, transparency, and animation to enhance the usability and consistency of the system and applications.OK, so this is blogging.
I am going to go and edit my blog template now, and think of something else to say!
I live in New Zealand a three island Nation (North Island, South Island and Stewart Island). We are surrounded by ocean and I spent the early years of my life a few steps from the beach.
