My monthly column
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!
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!
posted by two beach - half moon @ 11:09 PM
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