Walt's Corner

Now that the Reality Distortion Field has worn off the Stevenote, let’s take a look at what Macworld brought me this year.

First we received some really nice statistics. Leopard sold more than 5 million copies in the first three months. Wow. Astonishing. Lumped into number one was Time Capsule. Time Machine is part of Leopard, and Time Capsule is intended to seamlessly back up (up to) 50 macs on your network. Not so much important to me. I’m already happy with my current Time Machine setup. Maybe in a couple years or more I’ll be ready for this.

Second, Steve talked about the iPhone. 4 million iPhones sold to date. That’s an average of 20 thousand sold – per day. Again, wow! He also mentioned the SDK that will be available in February, and talked about the iPhone update that would be available today. Nice. This second part of the Stevenote makes me pretty excited. I have already updated my iPhone with the latest software. The the updated maps application is awesome. He also talked about the iPod Touch. That part doesn’t really show up on my “wow” scale since I have the iPhone.

Third, Steve introduced rentals on iTunes. Now this is what I’ve been waiting for! Now my Apple TV will be used twice as much. Free software update coming to the Apple TV within a couple weeks. Apple TV will become my source for pay per view. Sweet. Watch the movies on my iPod, computer, iPhone, or Apple TV. Keep the movie for up to 30 days, and once you start to watch it you have 24 hours in which to finish it. Sounds great to me!

Number four, and final – the MacBook Air. Go ahead. Check out that link. I’ll wait. The world’s thinnest notebook computer. .7 inch thick on one end, and .1 inch thick on the other. It does have it’s compromises though. Battery is not user-replaceable, therefore no swapping when one battery dies, like you can on a standard notebook. Slower processor. No optical drive (CD/DVD). No Firewire ports. This machine is not intended to replace your Mac, whatever flavor it is that you have, but is meant to augment it. It’s also available with a smaller hard drive that is really nothing more than a RAM disk. That baby will run you over $3,000.00. But I guarantee you it will be lightning fast with that flash drive.

Back in the day, and by the day I mean in the mid 90s, I would partition off some of my RAM into a virtual hard disk. It was super fast. I eventually created a startup script that would create the RAM drive, copy over the necessary files for the application I wanted to run from this RAM disk, and start the application. This will be similarly as fast, I’m sure.

Tonight I rented a movie just to see if it would play on the Apple TV yet. No dice. Guess I have to wait for the Apple TV update. It does play on the computer and my iPhone though.

Quote 1
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.”

-”Monkey Boy” Steve Ballmer on the iPhone. Reality? iPhone is outselling all Windows mobile devices combined, commanding a whopping 27% of the smartphone market. Not to mention they sold over 1 million phones in 74 days.

Quote 2
“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They`re not going to just walk in.”

–Ed Colligan’s response to the rumor of an iPhone. By the way, how’s that Foleo doing Ed?

Quotes 3, 4, & 5
“…its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.”
“There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive”
“If [Apple is] smart it will call the iPhone a “reference design” and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget.”

–Dvorak on the iPhone. Are you using a mouse these days D? Dvorak is the gift that keeps giving. He’s been spewing out garbage ever since he claimed that nobody would use this experimental peripheral we call a mouse. I’m surprised he has the gall to keep the iPhone story posted.

In other news, check out this story and the video that story links to (caution – not work friendly). Is this crazy or what? She is suing. Claims they are portraying her video as pornographic. Now how can you not make a video like without knowing what it was trying to portray? What was she thinking she was looking like writhing around and moaning like that – a mouskateer? She’s an idiot.

Say it aint so. The last living major holdout for the iTunes store has given in according to the latest New Music Tuesday email I received from iTunes: “Radiohead make their iTunes debut with In Rainbows, one of the most talked about and celebrated albums of the past year. A concise blend of technology and streamlined, unnerving guitar-driven songs, In Rainbows is now available with a digital booklet.”

Perhaps one of the most talked about, but certainly not celebrated. They refused to sell their album on iTunes, instead, trying to sell it themselves on their own website. And get this – for whatever price you wanted plus half a pound more for the download fee. Not even knowing who Radiohead was, I wasn’t about to give them the traditional dollar per song that I’m accustomed to paying for my music pleasure. So I gave them a pound for the album under the assumption that if I liked any of them, I’d pay them a dollar per song that I liked.

I didn’t like a single song. I wasn’t about to keep the songs, so I asked around to a few friends of mine, to see if they wanted any of the songs. I paid for them right? I was going to delete them anyways. Might as well give them to someone. Nobody wanted them. So into the trash they went, and then I emptied that trash. That’s the end of my experimentation with Radiohead. Welcome to iTunes guys. At least at iTunes they’ll be able to get more money than selling them on their own website.

Before you go upgrading to the latest and greatest of Office 2003 – SP3 – make sure you don’t have any older formats of the Office suite laying around. You won’t be able to open them anymore after your update.

Finally, a shout out to Fake Steve Jobs for linking to me yesterday. What a surprise! Thanks FSJ – namaste.

Or it could also be called Dramatic Stress Syndrome. It’s a term that, as far as I know, I made up and wanted to have a written record of it. It’s when you suffer stress from someone else’s drama.

Speaking of drama, check this article out. Seems that iPhone is being tracked as an operating system when being compared to other browsing platforms. Money quote “Finally, the iPhone has tripled its admittedly meager market share, going from .04 percent in July to .12 percent six months later. What’s interesting here is not the uptake so much as how the iPhone is categorized—as an OS. It’s quite possible that by the end of 2008, the iPhone will surpass Linux, which isn’t too hard since it rates only .63 percent. Still, it’s something of an accomplishment, considering that the iPhone will have been out only 18 months.” What will the freetards think of that? What a way to start out the new year!

Macworld Expo is set to kick off in a couple weeks. I’m looking forward to some more info on the official iPhone SDK launch.

I helped out at a Retiree Appreciation day on Saturday. Sunday we went with some friends for a meal at Logans and then a movie. I only had a salad there so that I could fill up on popcorn at the movie. We watched The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I enjoyed the movie, but the normal theater distractions were in full effect. Cell phones going off, kids talking. A Couple times the staff of the theater had to come in and quiet people down by threatening to have them removed. This would have been a good film to see for the first time on DVD in my home. I really enjoyed it, and it was pretty freaky (scary) in a few parts. Quite a few people screamed during the movie. Read this past blog for my opinions on theaters. One thing to keep in mind if you go see it – it’s not a movie like the Exorcist, it’s a movie about a trial, and during the trial there are flashbacks to what happened.

We picked up a large Hamilton-Beach food processor. I’ll be using that to make some salsa.

The president has chosen his replacement for O’Connor. Thing is, she has no experience as being a judge. Well, that’s one of his jobs – to pick the judges. I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to hire a mechanic, he better have some experience, no?

In the Mac universe, Apple is apparently getting rid of excess inventory by secretly upgrading the Mac Mini. There doesn’t seem to be any way to tell by the packaging if you are getting one of these treats, but many people have reported it already – memory boosts, increased CPU speed. It’s like buying a 110 piece tool set but when you get home and open it, you get the 150 one instead. Sweet!

Remember the format wars between Beta and VHS? They are about to happen again. There are two competing technologies (link no longer exists). One is called Blu-ray and the other is HD-DVD. Both are fighting over which will replace the current DVD format. The best doesn’t always win. Beta was a better technology over VHS but we all know who took that cake. I’m sure the first round of the new DVD players will offer machines that can handle both formats.

PC users can rejoice about the upcoming version of Office 12. Built in PDF support will be a part of it. Mac users have enjoyed this for some time now because PDF is an integral part of our operating system. Any application on a Mac can print to PDF instead of to the printer – right out of the box.

Poll Position
CNN Quick Vote
Q. Do you think Supreme Court justices should have previous experience on the bench?
A. Yes.
Call me crazy, but I think that if you are going to be serving as a judge in highest court in our land, you should have some experience being a judge.

Copyright Walter R. Basil. All rights reserved.