Category: opinion

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Are People Too Hard on Apple? (Part 2)

Apple

Continue from yesterday’s article…

The ability to run Windows applications on the Macintosh is not new. There had been:

  • Microsoft’s “VirtualPC for Mac”, formerly owned by Comnetix
  • “Q”, a CoCoa port of the OpenSource project “QEMU“
  • “Darwine” project, a port of the WINE OpenSource project [Updated 2006]OpenDarwine project closed.

Apple and others have made the possibility of running Windows applications/executables much easier and much much faster on the Macintosh.

Most of these solutions have their respective merits, but none so far has been as elegant and quick as the “dual boot” solution; except “Q”. Apple’s “dual boot” solution, code name, “Boot Camp” will be included in Apple’s up coming Mac OS X upgrade (v10.5, aka “Leopard”), with this software and firmware technologies, Apple has again demonstrated the “Apple Way” of doing things.

Despite the fact that Apple made a point of not supporting the Windows environment on the Macintosh, they do make it extremely easy to create the necessary partition for installing Windows XP on the Macintel. They even included the feature of not requiring any lost of existing data after partitioning; something that has not been done before on the Macintosh. To the spirit of the “Apple Way” of doing things, Apple provided a simple and intuitive “Mac Way” to specify the sizes of the respective partitions, plus also provided an easy and intuitive way for users to get back to the Mac OS boot from within the Windows XP environment and vice versa.

Boot Camp is just the tip of the iceberg for Apple’s virtualization strategy. Their next step is to take advantage of the virtualization technology within the Intel processors to allow Windows applications/executables to run within their respective Mac OS window in the Mac OS environment, without requiring the user to reboot each time they want to change to applications of a different operating system. For the matter of fact these applications can potentially from any operating systems (ie. Linux, BeOS, UNIX, etc.).

This sort of virtualization is what the “WINE” and “Darwine“ OpenSource projects aim to accomplish. At the moment the Darwine project requires any Windows applications wanting to run on Mac OS to be recompiled with the Darwine library. Apple’s goal will not require any recompilation.

With Boot Camp and future virtualization developments, the barrier of switching to the Macintosh platform had been lowered substantially. Macintosh is now most ideal for individuals who are forced to use the Windows platform at work, while not wanting to deal with the trouble of managing Windows on their personal computer. This is also the ideal moment for corporates to readdress the subsidization of personal computers for their employees for both business and personal uses. Eliminating the ownership of personal computers all together at the corporate level.

I can’t believe how long this article is getting. I will continue part 3 tomorrow…

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Are People Too Hard on Apple?

Apple

As many of you already know if you are a regular reader of my blog. There have been lots of buzz about the ability to run Windows XP on the new Macintel computers.

I have 2 articles here in my weblog on the subject:

Some even went as far as suggesting this is the prequel of Apple Computer abandoning the Mac OS in favor of Microsoft’s Windows OS.

And there are some who suggest this is a preview of a Microsoft take over of Apple Computer Inc., then incorporating it into one of its divisions, based on the tatics, if Microsoft cannot beat them might as well buy them. I respect that all these are individuals’ opinions and some are from well known and outspoken journalist (ie, John Dvorak) of the tech industry. Even so, I do not agree or share these authors’ sentiments.

Having used the Macintosh computer for the past 22 years and a couple more with Apple computers, I must say that it has become the computing tool of choice for me. I have always used a Macintosh, no matter which company I worked for. This was especially so when I was working in North America as a Macintosh Software Developer.

I do agree that the Macintosh had been distance dreams for many corporates who did not choose the platform from the start. These were mainly due to the cost of switching from the Windows environment. Yet there are many corporates, who made the initial decision to use the Macintosh, will tell you, the long term maintenance and support cost is much lower with the Macintosh platform compared to that of Windows platforms. This had been the case since 1984 when the first Macintosh was first introduced.

Since this article is getting long, I will continue part 2 tomorrow.

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Say “NO” to UN’s abolishment of Traditional Chinese in 2008

Chinese

Today I was drawn attention to the proposed action of the United Nations to abolish the recognition of Traditional Chinese and make Simplified Chinese the only official written language for Chinese.

I strongly disagree with this decision of the UN, and beg you to read the short article attached to the online petition.

Everyone who feels that this is not the right thing to do should complete the online petition and help spread the word.

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Made Up Words

There are so many words we use in the English language that we take for granted.

Over the years we have come to be accustom to various terms and phrases that are either made-up-words, made-up-phrases or brand names.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s we often use the words:

  • “NutraSweet” to refer to sugar substitute;
  • “Coke” to refer to cola drinks; and
  • “Coffeemate” to refer to coffee whitener.

Now with recent technological advances and its integration into our daily lives, more terms have come about.

In 2004, they came up with the term “Podcasting” (aka. “Podcast”), which is an amalgamate of the terms “iPod®” and “broadcasting”, to refer to recorded audio programs/shows for time-shift listening. While the word “iPod” itself is a made-up-word by Apple Computer, when they released their version of the MP3 player in October 2001. Similarly there is the word “Vodcast” to refer to recorded videos for time-shift viewing.

Speaking of time-shift viewing, there is also the term”TiVo“, which is a brand, company and service from the US company of the same name started in 1997. They developed the device and service for time-shift viewing of TV programs, by allowing users to record TV programs onto the built-in hard drive of the TiVo console. This made-up-word is often used in the context “I will just TiVo it” – meaning they will record the TV program and watch it at a later date, in another words, time shift the TV program in question.

There are quite many more made-up-phrases that were coined during this past decade:

  • “Let’s Google it” – meaning to search the web/Internet for the subject.
  • “I will Flickr it” – meaning to post a photo on the Internet of the subject.
  • “I will ICQ you” or “I will MSN you” – to tell someone that one will send a message via one of the many instant messaging (IM) services (ie. ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, iChat, GTalk, Jabber, etc.). A variation of this made-up-phrase is “I will IM you”
  • “Why don’t you beam it” – asking someone to send some data via IR (infrared) or Bluetooth from one mobile device to another (ie. telephone number, address, photo, ringtone, etc.).
  • “Let’s Wikipedia it” – meaning to look it up on Wikipedia (a multi-lingual open source encyclopedia

Some of these made-up-phrases and made-up-words are location or geo specific.

For example, in Hong Kong you may hear people use the following phrases:

  • “I want to doot it”
  • Can I doot it

These phrases mean “I want to use Octopus to pay for it” and “Can I pay by Octopus”.

The Octopus&trade card is a very successful and widely used contactless smartcard developed in Hong Kong with over 11 million cards in circulation. It is used in Hong Kong for both payment (public transport, store purchases, parking fees, newspaper stand, etc.) and non-payment (residential complex entry, business tower entry, primary school entry, etc.) transaction.

With all these made-up-words, it is also taking a lot less time for these words or phrases to be officially entered into dictionaries. In August 2005, Oxford Dictionaries officially included the word “Podcast” into their “Oxford Dictionary of English, Revised Second Edition” published on August 11, 2005, which is only 10 months after the word was first used. That is much faster than many of the other new words introduced in this edition of the dictionary; like: “eighty-six”, “fanboy” and “wiki”.

So next time you hear a word or phrase you may want to think about its origin, you never know, you may be participating in a new evolution.

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Disney Taking Over Pixar

Today Disney board members announced and approved the purchase of Pixar in a 7.4 billion deal.

The majority owner of Pixar, Steve Jobs, will become a board member of Disney, plus he will be the largest share holder of Disney.

For those who do not know, Pixar and Disney had a 7 movies deal started with “Toy Story” in 1995 that was about to expire with the upcoming movie “Cars”. Which had already grossed more than USD3.2 billion worldwide and yet to flop. Where as both Disney and Dreamworks have not met the epectations for their respective movies at the box office.

So who is taking over who here. With John Lasseter, Creative Director of Pixar, becoming the Creative Officer for both companies animation studios and overseeing design for new attractions at Disney theme parks, and Steve Jobs being the largest share holder of Disney. Is Pixar taking over Disney from within?

Will Steve Jobs now have a conflict of interest, being the person in charge of a media distribution channel, iTunes Music Store, and influencer of Disney?

Will the Mouse company start to use more Macintosh at its theme parks?

BTW: did I mention that the Macintosh was realeased on this day 22 years ago? Plus I was born on this day.

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Reactions to Steve Jobs’ Keynote at MacWorld 2006

Apple

Earlier today Steve Jobs of Apple Computers made his keynote for the official opening of MacWorld Expo 2006.

He started the keynote with some amazing retail figures. Some of the best financial figures in Apple’s history, which shocked all anaylsts, as a result shot Apple’s stock price 8% during the keynote.

Steve then went on to talk about the new versions of iLife and iWork. The latter does not have much improvements other than new themes for both Pages and Keynote.

A real different story with iLife, many improvements had been introduced to its component of the suite.

iPhoto now enables full screen photo editing and increased its capability of handling up to 250,000 photos in one Photo Library. The speed of scrolling through the photos within a Photo Library has dramatically improved. This is particularly important if you actually have 250,000 photos in your Photo Library.

You can read all about the new features of the other components: iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand in the iLife suite at Apple’s web site, but a new component of note is iWeb.

iWeb is a layman’s tool for creating web content from your iLife contents and have these published to .Mac for others to access. The most significant thing about this application is that, iWeb supports exporting of these web content pages in standard web formats (HTML, CSS, RSS, etc.) for publishing to your own web hosting provider.

I have yet to try iWeb but I will. For readers who may like to try an alternative that had been in the market for a while is RapidWeaver by Realmac

The most signicficant announcement from Steve Jobs [Apple] of this keynote are the new Macintosh computers based on the new Intel Core Duo processor.

Apple angered many when Steve Jobs announced the new iMac in his keynote. That’s because Apple had only just updated the iMac 8 months ago. There nothing really changed or added features with the new iMac, accept a brand new Intel Core Duo processor. According to Apple, the new iMac is two times (2x) faster than its predecessor.

The “One More Thing” at this year’s keynote was the announce of a new notebook, strangely called “MacBook Pro”. I share others’ opinions of not liking the label of the new Macintosh Intel based notebook. Although, I can understand why Apple is trying to promote the brand “Mac” or “Macintosh” with this new line.

For the layman purchasers out there, they may mistaken the new line of Macintosh as just any other “Wintel computer” (aka. “PC”). I had always hated people using the term “PC” or “Personal Computer” to refer to computers with Intel processes that runs Microsoft Windows.

I think Apple is worry that by introducing this new line of Intel based Macintosh (or “Macintel”) the average consumers would lump Apple into the likes of Acer, DELL, Lenovo and HP and anyone else who makes a computer based on Intel processors.

One thing I really not happy about with the new MacBook Pro are its included SuperDrive. Apple had just recently transformed all their computers to come built in with a 8x SuperDrive that is cable of producing DVD-DL and DVD+DL. I believe this is definite backwards decision of Apple. Although, the reason for this change could be the result of the new MacBook Pro being developed by a different team of engineers and sourced separately from the rest of the PowerPC based Macintosh. I just hope that Apple rectify this soon in the form of an upgrade option.

One other thing that really would have drove the sales of the new Intel based Macintosh, is the much talked about ability of the new Macintosh to “dual boot” meaning that users are able to choose to start (“Boot”) the Macintosh computer in Windows or some other OS or Mac OS X.

This had initially been concluded as not possible. At least with Microsoft Windows XP. This is because the new Intel based Macintosh uses a technology called EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). For Microsoft the first Windows OS to support the EFI technology is the upcoming Windows Vista.

People who knows me well would ask, why I care, if the new Intel Macintosh are dual bootable. Well, if the new Intel Macintosh are dual bootable, then all those consumers who are “on the fence”, can’t decide whether to try a Macintosh or not would have nothing to loose from trying the new Intel based Macintosh.

I think Apple also realizes this fact, and that is why Apple’s current official opinion about Mac users installing other OS onto their Intel based Macintosh is that, “we will not prevent users from installing foreign OS”.

It has been an exciting start for Apple, with many more news and new products to come before December. Time will tell how all these will turn.

One disappointment I have with Steve Jobs’ keynote is that the rumored Apple Media Center Computer did not materialize. The rumors was that they would be a Mac Mini PVR with a revised Apple FrontRow as the main interface. There is still 11 more months in the year, we may still see this rumored product. I personally hope so.

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Discover New Music

Pandora is a new service by Pandora Media Inc.. It is essentially a very smart customized radio station. It is based on the work from the Music Genome Project.

It allows you to specify the music you like and based on the Genome of the music specified it will play other songs that it thinks you will like.

The great thing about this service is that it does not require any download, accept for the FLASH plug-in to be installed on your favorite browser.

Why do I think Pandora is great? Well we have to begin by talking about the problem with many of the current online music stores (iTunes Music Store, Connect, etc.) and similarly the brick and mortar stores (HMV, Best Buy, SAM’s, etc.). The fact that it is difficult to find what you (the individual) like. More importantly, what I may like based on my music preference. Pandora solves this problem by using the Genome of the music you specify to seek out other songs that you may like.

This is similar to the technology applied with Amazon.Com and other online retail, but this is done without other members’ input.

Pandora’s Genome library is built by professional musicians, each with at least 3 years of professional music experience, performing classification of a song.

Each song takes about 3 hours to classify and each musician participating had gone through extensive training on Music Genome.

You can check out My Radio Station at Pandora.

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Don’t Be a Smart Aleck

Don’t be a smart aleck…. at least in United Kingdom.

A man received a speeding ticket with a picture of him driving through a speed radar. So the man send the police a photo of the money for the speeding ticket. The police then send him a photo of handcuffs.

This shows that even the police has a sense of humor, but will have the last word.

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Size of Toilet Paper Sheet

ToiletRoll

I am talking about those perforated sheets in a toilet roll.

Accept for the some communities within Africa, parts of the South Pacific islands and parts of China, most people around the world know what I am talking about.

It puzzles me as to why these perforated sheets are sized the way they are.

Whether you are male or female, I believe the standard size perforated sheet would not be large enough for any conceivable use. If no one would ever find these standard size large enough, then why are they perforated the way they do?

A typical manufacture would normally analyze the usage pattern of their end users and then improve on their products over time. As far as I my knowledge, I do not believe the toilet paper manufactures have ever exercised this practice.

Constant iteration is the bases for modern Customer Centric Designs and developments. Without constant iterations, these products and services will probably not satisfy the business requirements they are target to address.

The iterated user centric design will start with:

  1. the analysis of the target customers of their potential needs
  2. outline the goals of the business objectvies
  3. brainstorm and design solutions addressing these end user needs and business requirements
  4. development of the solutions
  5. through out the processes (4 – 5) constant verifications and analysis of the metrics measuring the satisfaction of requirements

Not only is this a good way to design, develop and refine a product or service. It is necessary for the rapid changing lifecycle of of today’s environment.

So if anyone works with product development at one of the large toilet paper manufacture; like Procter & Gamble, please help me shed some light on why toilet paper sheets are sized the way they are.

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Dismal Atttempts of Sony™

Sony

For some reason or another the once great company, Sony™, has made numerous errors in the past year that have drawn bad publicity to itself.

Could this have something to do with the change of leadership leaving the company for the first time in the hands of an outsider?

These taboos are:

  • Sony™ allowed Apple Computers to take over the portable music player market that Sony™ created, many years ago, with the invention of the Walkman® line of products
  • The Sony™ PSP® firmware upgrade v1.20 for some reason did not work for US versions of the PSP® for many months, while Japanese version of the PSP® did
  • Fail portable audio player that only plays Sony™ proprietary format ATRAC3. It is not until major uproar from the public that Sony™ portable audio players recently, few months ago, began supporting the more popular MP3 format
  • Sony™ made the White version of the Sony™ PSP® not 100% compatible with all PSP® games
  • Sony™ forcing everyone to buy movies on UMD media, which only the Sony™ PSP® plays (as of November 2005). This was not resolve until hackers were able to make movies playable via the Memory Stick Duo
  • Sony™ was upset with Apple Computers and did not want to release its content to iTunes Music Store Japan. So Apple went ahead with the launch without them and in 4 days became the most popular legal music download site in Japan. There were even Sony™ signed artists who did not agree with Sony™ decision, and started a group just to help artists list their song on iTunes Music Store Japan. In the end Sony™ backed down and decided to work with Apple Computers.

Now the most recent and most embarrassing decision was Sony BMG shipping a DRM (Digital Rights Management) software in its SACD (Super Audio CD), called XCP created by First 4 Internet Ltd..

In many cases these CDs are just marked as having better audio or additional free content. To identify if you have one of these Sony BMG CD, you need to look at the small print on the back of the CD jewel, it should say “cp.sonybmg.com/xcp”.

Normally these taboos only affected my Windows friends, but this time my Macintosh friends also need to be aware of this. Yes, the Mac OS X is included among all flavors of Windows (98SE, ME, 2000 SP4 and XP) OS (Operating System) that this DRM has installers for.

Why is all the concern you say? Well the fact that manufacture is putting DRM in media is a concern in itself, but I will not get into the debate of that in this submission.

What the XCP DRM does is to install itself onto the target computer system after the user places the Sony BMG audio CD into their computer. In most cases after the CD is placed into the system it will try to play it. When it does an EULA (End User License Agreement) is presented to the user. If the user refuses the license it quits and do not do anything, but you will not be able to read the audio CD from your computer.

If the user agrees to the software license the XCP DRM will be installed and then it hides all traces of Sony™ DRM software from the OS, making it impossible for any virus detector to find or to uninstall.

You may say, so far that’s no big deal, but what the XCP DRM has is what the software industry called “RootKit“. This RootKit in itself is not a virus per say, contrary to what NBC News is calling it, but I guess, as the saying goes, good news is not news, by calling this a Virus is becomes news.

To a layman, one may not be worry yet. Let me explain further or you can read more about RootKit yourself.

What the XCP RootKit is doing is “calling home” to Sony™ servers telling them which album and particularly which song you are listening to and when. You may say this is an invasion of privacy, but still no big deal. Well the fact that the XCP RootKit hides itself and all Sony&trade software from the OS is a big deal.

Any hacker can now relies on this XCP RootKit that Sony™ had forced its customer to install. In affect, Sony™ has created a Trojan opportunity for the hackers to do whatever they want with the malware and no Anti-Virus software will be able to locate it or even know of its presence.

Since the release of these Sony BMG CDs worldwide, there is already one virus created to take advantage of this Trojan opportunity; fortunately for my Macintosh friends, this is a Windows only virus. I will not point out the virus to avoid promoting it further than it deserves.

Here is a step by step documentation by Mark Russinovich, of the steps that Sony BMG makes you go through before allowing you to download the uninstaller.

Sony BMG has since recalled all the unsold CD with the XCP DRM and announced that they will “temporary” not ship any more CD with the XCP DRM software.

Although, government agencies from respective countries including Japan, Italy, UK and USA are going to start criminal investigation on Sony BMG.

There are already two famous law firms specialized in Class Action Sue who will be filing sues against Sony BMG.

The lesson to take away for my readers, do not install anything that a CD ask you to if you’re not sure what it is. Ask someone whom you trust to know what it is for.

As for Sony™, you really need to consider the advisors who are advising the management within the Sony™ empire. It seems like incompetence is not restricted to any one Sony™ company.