WTF is this?

tungsten t gps

Can anyone explain a blog like this to me? What is a body trying to accomplish by creating this? Baffling.

And Hayduke, according to your blog I should be finding porn by now. I've clicked the "Next Blog" button ten or twelve times, and this is the closest I've come. Where's the dang porn?

$6000 to Anyone Who Can Dual Boot OSX and Windows XP on New Intel-Macs

Recent attempts at installing Windows XP have left users scratching their heads. Hopefully a $6000 prize will inspire creative thinking.

I haven't read the article yet, but it seems that this EFI thing is giving people fits. Is it that it's too new to be understood by many, or that it's architecturally barely possible to make this work with pre-Vista software? I fully believe someone will get it working, but it's an added wrinkle I don't recall anyone anticipating. Most likely people will limp along running XP on the Intel Macs in some sort of crippled way (which means that few people will have the tolerance to do it) until Vista is released and is immediately installable on Intel Macs. Then we'll see what the real impact of the Intel switch is.

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Sluggish iMac sales suggest early Intel transition challenges

Apple's decision to unleash Intel-based Mac systems six months ahead of schedule is proving less successful than the company anticipated. Two weeks following the Macworld Expo San Francisco keynote, sources report that sales of the Intel-based iMac are lower than Apple expected.

Not entirely surprising, really. Two factors: Speed increases not as fast as advertised, and the majority of the third-party apps (and even some Apple Pro apps, not that the iMac is their customary home) have not been ported to "Universal" binaries with native Intel support. It's early, though, and much like the PowerPC transition, once the developers get on board with Universal releases things will pick up.

Also when they release Virtual PC and it's blazing fast and runs all Windows games.

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Cringely's 2006 Predictions

Cringely, as always, offers thoughtful and interesting predictions that anyone interested in the business of technology should read. I take issue with a couple of things though:

1. Right off the bat, #1 prediction is a slew of new Apple products, most of which I think are no-brainers, except "...two new Intel Macs with huge plasma displays, but with keyboards and mice as options -- literally big-screen TVs that just happen to be computers, too." WTF?? I cannot see Apple releasing a product with those specs. I agree with the concept, however - a touch-screen Mac that's meant as a media center might find an audience, but a) they would not do plasma, LCD or some flavor of digital, at costs lower than anyone has previously managed to negotiate, and b) they would not be marketed as TVs. If my read on Steve is correct, he doesn't think the living room is going to sprout a computer, he thinks the computer room is going to sprout a TV, which may then find a spot in the living room. In other words, convergence is going to happen from the motherboard, not the cable box. Not sure I buy that, but I certainly don't believe that Apple is going to release a big-screen, Intel-based plasma display. Bollocks.


2. Number 3: Apple will offer limited support, via the web and hosted user communities, of OS X on any Intel hardware. I'm on the fence about this. Of course they'd profit a bit from selling the OS to curious/frustrated PC hardware owners, but would they risk cannibalizing their hardware business this way? Feature-by-feature cost comparisons of the Apple and Dell offerings may be favorable, but let's be honest - you can get a stripped down PC, or even build one yourself, for much less than the cheapest Mac models. It's going to be a tough choice for the cash-strapped Mac faithful to turn away from Apple's hardware but not their software, but it won't be a choice at all for the PC crowd. It feels like a move to support OS X on all Intel (and AMD??) hardware would forever doom the Apple hardware to it's tiny market share.


3. Number 13: "Google WON'T go head-to-head with Microsoft for a desktop operating system or a cheap PC." Why not? I mean, the obvious reasons are that Google has no OS experience, no hardware-building experience, and MS is still far and away the market gorilla despite stumbling with Vista's delivery and feature set and taking huge hits on the security front. But all monopolies have to end at some point, and why not start now? Obviously my loyalties are with Apple when it comes to taking market share away, but Google certainly has some bright and innovative programmers on staff who could take the desktop in exciting new directions. When I put it that way, it would seem that Apple has something to fear from Google, perhaps close to as much as they have to fear from Vista stealing all their best interface and feature ideas. Google should grab a toehold by offering a very-low-cost PC with an incredibly basic OS that depends on the Internet for many applications. Windows Live, but done correctly, without subscription profits as its raison d'etre. Geeks would review it poorly for lacking "key" features like the ability to run all downloadable software or create indexes in word processing docs, but geeks always overestimate the number of features the average user actually uses. If Google is smart enough to include only the most popular features in their Google OS, they'll capture some users. Not many, but it would be a start.

Dang I write too much. Hope you read all of that. Comments, please!

What Technology Will Be Like in 2001

...according to a 1989 Compute! Magazine article: scan the custom newspaper that spills from your fax; capture segments of a show you like and put them in a video report for school for $1,000; ISDN will simultaneously transmit voice, video, and computer data. You'll talk to your TV set, and it'll customize itself...

This article itself is pretty accurate, though the extent to which computers have invaded the household and everyday work is less than what they predict. Students don't write with electronic pens and, when we come home we don't "... slip on special eyeglasses and stroll through a completely artificial world." But I do slip in a DVD and stroll through the world of Myst IV, so pretty close.

What I always choke on is the "customization" thing. Something about the idea that my computer or TV only shows me the content I choose seems so...narrow-minded to me. Part of the reason I still enjoy receiving the paper NY Times every weekend is that I often stumble upon, and read, articles I would normally have skipped if I were reading them online. And I feel that reading them enriches me, makes me a more interesting and well-rounded person, at least in current events. Which is important to me. There's something of the George Bush, living-in-a-dangerous-bubble quality to "customizing" your news to only read about the stuff you're interested in. Of course we all do this to a certain extent - you won't find me regularly reading Foxnews.com, our DVR captures only those shows we want to watch, and my wife no doubt skips right over a lot of articles I would read immediately. So already the customization meme has invaded our househould, and we miss information that we might now have were we watching it on the more serial, synchronous news sources of yore - network news, newspapers, radio, etc. We're probably all the more liberal for not exposing ourselves to more conservative "thought", but I can't say it troubles us on a daily basis. Well, obviously it troubles me a little bit or I wouldn't be writing about this!

Thing is, we do fight the filtering, in at least two ways: NPR is almost always on in the house, and we get and read the weekend NYT religiously (except for today when the bastards totally skipped the initial delivery and the replacement copy - grrr). But I realize that even with those the content might be perceived as liberally-biased to begin with, and of course I turn off NPR anytime I hear a Bush sound bite. (I can't listen to the man without white-knuckling the steering wheel and fuming about the twin tragedies of his elections. How we could twice "choose" a "leader" who is so stupid is really just stupefying to me.) So I'm still filtering and customizing.

I guess what I'm trying to say, as artlessly as possible, is that the increasing ability of the public to tune out thinkers and lines of thought that they disagree with may be contributing, in no small part, to the current divisions of ideology we're seeing today, at least in political discourse. If those who disagree with gay marriage were to listen to more NPR, read more NY Times, or read books with gay characters, there might be a percentage of them who would have an open mind toward it. (Thank goodness Maryland does.) Conversely, perhaps if I listened to more religious people about their beliefs I might be more willing to concede that there may be a god, if not a God. Unlikely, but who knows? In any event, I don't believe that I always know exactly what I want to read about or watch - I like the variety and the surprise of exploring new topics. I hope people aren't losing their willingness to learn about topics they aren't familiar with already.

Thoughts on Apple's new products

I wouldn't be MacDoug if I didn't comment on Apple stuff once in a while, eh? It was a bit surprisingly to see how fast they shoehorned the Intel chips into their desktop and laptop lines, but the speed increases are gratifying. Clearly much of the advance work had been done in software, keeping the Intel kernel of OS X alive and updated in parallel, but what wasn't as clear was that the hardware updates done to the iMac just a few months ago were also laying the groundwork for an easy substitution of the Intel motherboard for the PowerPC one. Interesting move, considering that the last iMac rev was awfully attractive and no doubt pretty popular. Now to have a new model that's "2x faster" but otherwise identical released practically weeks after is a bit risky for their image. It also strikes me as a tad precipitous since many apps are not Universal yet and Rosetta remains as yet unproven in terms of performance, at least from what I've read. This will probably impact the MacBook Pro more than the iMac, but still. And they're not mentioning what may be the biggest impact to folks like me who teach using older software - that OS 9 "Classic" apps stop working on the Intel architecture. That's a huge loss for the education division - I depend on many Classic apps for my curriculum, and I'm going to milk my current eMac/G5 lab for all it's worth before upgrading those suckers.

Oh, and I hate the "MacBook Pro" name, all parts of it. If you're going to leave the "Powerbook" brand behind, leave it way behind - don't save the "book" and just tack on a new prefix and an inexplicable suffix. Does this mean that the iBook's replacement is going to be just the "MacBook"? Mmm, that wouldn't be confusing or anything. And just how do you say that asinine, chimeric word? Mac-book? Mcbook? Mac (beat) book? One of my first rules of marketing (and maybe it's a real one, I dunno) is that the product's name should be immediately accessible and unequivocally clear. No questions about how to pronounce it, where to put the emphasis, none of that. I mean, who was confused about the word "iMac"? Despite the fact that they cleverly capitalized the very letter that receives the least emphasis, nobody says it incorrectly. Eye-mac. Bingo, no problem. By this measure, "OS X" is a huge failure. Yes, it's cool looking to have a giant "X" on your packaging - very ominous and sexy - but can I tell you how many ignoramuses I've met out there, many of them in tech-related fields, who still say it "Oh-ess Ex"? Goddamn that bothers me, which is revealing in itself since I'm sitting here ranting about how the name is blatantly obfuscated and therefore stupid. Maybe they did it to create this insiders' club of people who watch Keynotes and hang around at CompUSA who have actually heard Apple employees speak the name, and thus know the secret handshake and have the decoder ring. But if you want to market your OS and hardware to the masses, Apple people, what the hell are you doing assigning names that only the geeks and the faithful can "know"? Kind of uncool for the company that's supposed to be making computers for the non-geeks who can't handle Windows.

The inclusion of cameras on the MacBook Pro and iMac is interesting, though, and may mark an upsurge in video chat and other video-related apps and practices in the future. I'm glad I got my iSight for xmas - anyone want to vid-chat with me? Think I should put out a vidcast :)?

Sony Hasn't Learned from Microsoft's Mistakes - Gizmodo

Production cycles have interested me ever since I was part of a disastrous systems development project with Andersen Consulting, back in the "day". We were using Oracle SQL server as the back-end and Oracle Forms and PowerBuilder to build front-end GUIs for a custom-designed petroleum trading system. It was a nightmare. The development schedule was, in retrospect, appallingly optimistic, and our Go Live date slipped at least five times, if not more. I can still remember the feeling of leaving at 5 PM and coming home on time after months of overtime, because our project manager finally put his foot down after the fifth launch date slip and said "My people aren't working like dogs anymore." It was bizarre to be home in time for dinner!

I think about that project whenever I hear about a high-profile wingding like PS3 has been delayed, and I think, those poor people, they're suffering horribly because someone thought they knew how to put a project schedule together. It's very easy to sit in a room and pare back deadlines in MS Project or whatever, but when reality smacks you and you realize that those dates were pure fantasy, it's the little people who are going to pay. MS Seems to have pulled it off, more or less, with the Xbox 360, but Vista is clearly imploding and shedding features like crazy just to make it out five years after its predecessor. Sounds like PS3 might be having the same problem. Funny how the OS X releases don't seem to be bogging down...hmmm. I wish Apple would allow a journalist in to document their project life-cycle, a la Soul of a New Machine.