iDallas!AMD sold more desktop processors than Intel for the week ending April 24th, with 52% of that market. It’s thought to be the first time that has ever happened. AMD already gave Intel something sour to chew on with their Opteron 64 bit processor and now they’ve managed to become more than just a little competitive in desktop cpu sales. All of this is without the help of Dell, too.
Geeks everywhere are no doubt watching all of this with keen interest…
A San Francisco guy who had his motorcycle vandalized twice in a couple of days wrote an open letter to the perpetrator. I laughed out loud a few times, though it still sucks that his bike was violated like that.
I’m starting to lean this way myself.
Sony has launched their Connect digital music service. It boasts the largest music selection (bigger than iTunes?) and has the same pricing structure as the rest (99 cents a track, etc). It’s for Windows only and I think it uses their own proprietary ATRAC-3 digital music format and is playable on their own Minidisc devices.
I just had an audio cd get stuck in my G4 powerbook (rev 2 667 Mhz, combo drive). It was a mechanical
problem as the OS still saw the CD and it tried to eject it but couldn’t. Most of the fixes I found on the
web were for problems where the CD didn’t show up at all. I tried rebooting with no change and I tried
squeezing on the powerbook case around the combo drive in case something was stuck or something. I then
decided to let good ol’ gravity help out. I first held the powerbook so the combo drive was vertical with
the slot facing straight down while pushing the eject button. No luck. Then I tried holding the powerbook
upside down and voila it popped right out when I pushed the eject button. Nice. Sometimes it’s the simple
fix that does the trick.
UPDATE: It turns out I now have to hold my powerbook upside down every time I want to eject a cd. It’s more of a workaround than a fix, I guess.
UPDATE2: More of a real fix for this problem is to stick a quarter in the cd slot opening a little ways and just twist it a bit. Don’t twist too hard, obviously! This worked for me and popped things back into place so it worked perfectly again afterwards.
I saw The Punisher movie. It was entertaining, but I think they might have tried too hard to stick with the comic book theme in parts. I’ve heard of some people completely hating it, but I didn’t think it was all that bad. If you’re a fan of The Punisher comic book series, you’ll get a kick out of the movie. It’s violent and a lot of people die as one might expect. Thomas Jane, the actor they picked for the title role does a good job and captures the character well. John Travolta never seems especially menacing to me, but he does manage to feel at least a little slimy in his role as the bad guy. Overall, it was a fun movie, but don’t go into it expecting much.
Every email I get from a hotmail user is completely devoid of formatting and is just a stream of text. The original message is usually ok, but if it includes any forwarded messages or is in reply to a previous message those messages are very difficult to decipher. Is it just me? What’s going on with Hotmail?
Ok, here’s my opinion on the ongoing debate about what Apple should be doing with their iPod and iTunes products. I think Apple is currently doing what they should be doing. They should milk their current dominance as long as they can and get all the cash out of it they can. They would be stupid to ‘play well with others’ until there are others worth playing with. Right now there aren’t any.
Apple is unlike most other technology companies in that they think of themselves as providing a full ‘experience’ rather than just a bunch of different products. That’s what’s great about their products and at the same time what has been Apple’s downfall in the marketplace. Using an iPod and iTunes and the iTunes Music Store is a uniquely Apple experience through and through. The level of synchronization between the hardware and the software is unparalleled (currently!) and the iTunes Music Store is the best online music store, from what I’ve heard. I don’t know that for a fact because I haven’t actually used any of the other online music stores because most of them don’t allow access from Mac web browsers. Using an iPod with software other than iTunes would not provide the same experience. Likewise, using a device other than an iPod with iTunes would not provide the same experience.
I am not saying that Apple does everything better than anyone else or that they are somehow the magic company that can do no wrong. Far from it! Apple has produced a lot of crappy products in the past and they routinely screw things up. I do think Apple’s line of hardware and software provides the most compelling computing experience for me and people like me, but I’m not like all people. You can use whatever computer platform you want to use and pay however much you want and choose whatever level of service failures you want to deal with. I honestly wish there were a lot more computing options to pick from. Wouldn’t it be great if Windows, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, Linux and Macintosh all had approximately equal marketshare? There would be such an amazing plethora of options and interoperability would always be a top priority.
Ok, so if Apple were to open the iPod to play music in WMA format from competing online stores they would also have to make iTunes as integrated as possible with all of the various options out there to help ensure the continuity of that iPod experience I described above. That effort at integration would cost Apple a lot of time and effort so they have to consider whether or not it would be worth it. Would it sell more iPods? It would probably sell some more, but the total digital online music market is so miniscule compared to the digital music player market that I don’t think it would really make much of a difference at all. I guess it would get some of their geek critics off of their back, but that’s about all. The picture in 2 years will be significantly different, but that’s how I see it now.
If Apple were to go the other route and license the Fairplay DRM scheme so other online stores could start selling music in ‘iPod format’ or whatever, they would lose even MORE control over the end-user experience. People might buy that beautiful iPod and then end up having a sucky non-Apple-quality experience through the Walmart online store or whatever and then decide the iPod sucks. Consumers are like that!
I think Apple wants to try to keep the whole iTunes and iPod platform together as long as possible, if not forever. They want to become one of the standard online digital music platforms and license the whole thing as a unit like they did with HP. The deal with HP makes sense because the iPod/iTunes experience remains intact even though it comes from HP instead of Apple. It’s all about that experience. I wish more companies would approach the design of their offerings like that.
The years I spent using BeOS daily were marked by some of the most harmonious computer days and weeks of my life. It wasn’t because BeOS was perfect, but it was so fresh and had so many great new ideas. The user community was composed of a lot of people unsatisfied with the state of computing, and looking for something more inspiring. I don’t know if I personally found inspiration in BeOS, but I got at least a little bit of joy out of knowing it existed.
Anyway, here’s thinking of you, BeOS… the second computer operating system that refuses to die… and the first in my heart! Hahaha, umm.
A man reportedly paid $1.1 million for a mobile phone number. The number is 135.8585.8585 and is pronounced “let me be rich, be rich, be rich, be rich” in Chinese. Umm… yeah.