Technology

Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.

Orkut

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Much of the buzz this past week that I utterly and completely ignored has been about Orkut, Google‘s entry into the social networking trend. As with the rest, you sign up, invite friends, link to other friends, and so on. I’ve never been too hot about these things — they seem kind of silly, reducing friendships and acquaintances to the level of Pokemon characters (collect the whole set!).

Still, I’m not entirely averse to giving it shot, especially when I get two invitations to join on one day (from both Mike and Jonas), so I figured I’d at least sign up and poke around for a bit (if you’re on Orkut, here’s my profile). I signed up, filled out a good chunk of the profile information, joined a few communities, and added a few friends. Amusingly enough, of the four friends I have listed, I’ve met exactly one of them in the real world (Jon, who interviewed me for the [MSNBC story] about the Microsoft fracas), which is one of the reasons I’ve always been amused by these types of websites — just what, exactly, is the criteria for “friend”? Myself, I’d kind of like it if there were levels or categories of friends (online friends, real life friends, close friends, acquaintances, friends I’d jump in bed with if given half a chance, etc.), but that’s something I’ve yet to see in one of these.

[MSNBC story]: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3341689/ “Blogger dismissed
from Microsoft”
At the moment, with four friends listed, I’m connected in some way to 5,298 people. I have no idea what that means, really (how far do these connections go? Two degrees? Six? Twelve? Infinite?), but that’s what it tells me.

I experimented a bit with the communities feature by creating one for TypePad users. Amusingly enough, after a run to the bank to get my account back in the black, when I got home I found that there were now two more members for that community — none other than Ben and Mena. Rather nifty, that.

Now, of course, the question becomes whether or not I’ll ever remember to check in on this whole thing. I was invited into and signed up for Friendster a while back, and as yet, I believe I’ve checked up on my account there all of four or five times. Now, of course, I can’t even log in, as I’ve apparently managed to forget my login information, and can’t find a confirmation e-mail saved on my computer. Ah, well. So it goes.

iTunes: “Space Shanty” by Leftfield from the album Leftism (1995, 7:15).

Secret Apple computer revealed!

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Well…in 1984, that is. The Mercury News has re-printed an article from 1984 heralding the release of Apple’s then-unknown new Macintosh computer.

After two years of secrecy, brainstorming and sometimes zany company maneuvering, Apple Computer Inc. will unveil a new personal computer Jan. 24 that is the size of a stack of paper and, for about the same price, contains more power than the basic IBM PC.

Known as the Macintosh and considered by analysts to be critical the the future of the company, the machine already is winning rave reviews from the dealers, software developers and industry analysts for its compactness and ease of use.

The machine, which sources way will sell for \$2,495, is designed to catch the fancy of the college students, small businessmen and the American consumer who wants to have ``fun” with a computer. It is priced between the less expensive Apple IIe and the more expensive Lisa.

(via MacRumors)

Changing my habits

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NetNewsWire grouped

As sloppy as my apartment can get (and believe me, it can get quite sloppy — though it’s usually just “extremely cluttered” as opposed to “disgustingly messy”, a small but important difference), I tend to be extremely organized in many other areas of my life. My occasional rants about metadata and .mp3 tags have probably clued a few people in to this aspect of my personality. I also tend to keep my movies, books, and music alphabetized, files on my computers all in their appropriate places, and so on. Heck, part of my drive to ensure that my web pages validate as clean, standards-compliant code stems from this innate desire for simple categorization and the ability to find things quickly.

To that end, since I started using NetNewsWire to keep up with the various weblogs and news sites that I like to read, I’ve used its grouping function to assign each RSS feed to a specific category — technology, macintosh, personal, and so on.

About a month ago, Rand was asking about RSS reading habits, and after a bit of thought prompted by his post, I’ve been wondering for a bit if this categorization is really the best approach for me to take. As my list of subscribed feeds grows (currently hovering right around 100 or so, give or take a few I’m reading on a trial basis — nowhere near Scoble’s 600+, but still fairly respectable), I’m finding it harder and harder to get through all my feeds on a regular basis. I’ve been doing very well at keeping up with sites that were in the groups at the top of the list (usually Personal and Macintosh), but not so well with groups towards the bottom (usually Links and Political). If I get bored, hungry, or distracted during my reading, the ones at the bottom get fairly regularly neglected.

NetNewsWire ungrouped

So, starting tonight, I’m going to try to vary my reading habits a bit to see what that does. I’ve deleted all the groups I was using before, and instead have all the feeds listed in more-or-less alphabetical order, top to bottom in a single group, ordered by date posted. While the amount of information doesn’t really change, the presentation is different enough that it might make a difference in what I find on any given day. I know I’ve missed a few breaking stories over the past few weeks, especially in the political arena, simply because I wasn’t getting far enough through my reading to see them until they’d already been blogged to death by everyone else on the ‘net.

I’m hoping that this little adjustment will be enough to help me keep up with everything a little bit better. No way to know until I try, of course.

iTunes: “She Cries Your Name” by Orton, Beth from the album Who Will Be Big In ’98? (1997, 4:47).

Hey!

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Hey!

On its face, that expression is neither offensive nor disturbing. “Hey!” is an informal way to say hello. It indicates kindness, simple courtesy and an economy of words.

But a 13-year-old boy at Richland Middle School in Richland Hills was suspended for three days in December because he sent that simple message to every computer in the school using an archaic form of instant messaging. The software was created years ago in the old disk operating system used in earlier versions of personal computers.

This story has been making the rounds on the ‘net for the past few days (see MetaFilter, /.). It’s got all the hallmarks of something bound to catch the interest of a lot of geeks: a kid exploring and discovering how his computer actually works beyond simple point-and-clicking, an innocent mistake when demonstrating capabilities to friends, and an overbearing school administration. It might not have raised as much of a ruckus as it did, except that in the course of writing his article about the events, the columnist received an e-mail from one of the school administrators involved in the incident questioning the right of anyone not involved directly in the school system to criticize teaching and discipline techniques.

Too often, people who do not know the real world of public education feel that they are the ‘experts’ who have all the solutions and that their opinions are as valuable as those who live in this world daily.

…

I invite you, parents, our state representatives, and anyone else that thinks they know how a teacher or a district should react to ANY situation to come live with us for a while — be a substitute teacher for a few weeks and learn the real world of public education.

…more troubling is the notion that Sweeney does not believe that the rest of us have any right to question the decisions made by public educators.

Remember, we pay the salaries of the teachers and staff. We buy the computers. We pay for the buildings in which they are used. As long as public school is public, the Beverly Sweeneys of the world need to know that it is our right and duty to look over their shoulders and question what they do.

In this case, the punishment of Carl Grimmer was overkill, but the response of the school’s computer liaison shows that public education really does demand greater oversight from us outsiders, certainly not less.

Many of the discussions spurred by this event and the various responses from the people involved have been very interesting to read. It turns out that the kid and his parents have put up a page detailing their view of the events and the responses to them. It’s an entertaining read — everyone (except the school) seems to be handling everything quite reasonably.

iTunes: “Go” by Moby from the album Hackers 2 (1997, 3:59).

Apple gaining ground in enterprise markets

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It’s so nice to live in a time when every news article about Apple doesn’t involve some form of doom and gloom predictions. Not only have the “Apple is doomed” proclamations died down, things just keep getting better — even in markets historically far outside of Apple’s domain.

What’s stunning isn’t that Apple Computer Inc.’s engineers can, say, design a server with two 2-GHz G5 processors, 1GB of memory, storage capacity of 80 to 750GB and loads of other goodies all in a slim 1U package (a mere 1.75-in. thick). No, what’s stunning is that Apple’s marketers will price the Xserve system at \$3,999. That makes the long-reputed price-gouging Macintosh maker the price leader for dual-CPU servers by a couple of bucks. But when you add in Windows per-client pricing, the savings become huge. Apple sells its systemswith no per-client fees for Mac OS X. In contrast, a 25-user enterprise license for Windows adds \$2,495 to the price of a dual-processor PowerEdge 1750 server from Dell Inc.

(via MacSlash)

iTunes: “God Part II” by U2 from the album Rattle and Hum (1988, 3:15).

About that iPod mini

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When Steve Jobs made the announcement of the iPod mini during the Macworld SF keynote, I wasn’t overly impressed.

…the biggest news on the iPod mini will be the price — no matter how happy people are about having the smaller player available, and no matter how cool it is, too many people were hoping for the \$100 price point. At this point, the 15Gb full-size iPod is only \$50 more than the 4Gb iPod mini…is this really going to go over well? Only time will tell, I suppose, but I have to say that I’m fairly skeptical. It’ll be a bit sketchy as to whether the smaller form factor and colors will be enough of a draw to offset the reduced capacity.

After thinking it over for a few days, though, I think I need to revise that.

See, I currently have a 2nd generation 10Gb iPod, which I bought for \$399 (it was the midrange model at the time I bought it). I also have an unusually large music collection: upwards of 1200 CDs, which will take up somewhere upwards of 80Gb of space once it’s all ripped onto my computer. Even if I had the money to spring for the top-of-the-line iPod, at 40Gb it would still hold less than half of my entire music library, so I’m not in a position of being able to carry around my entire music collection with me at all times.

Because of that, I’ve been looking at how I do use my iPod — and, quite simply, I really don’t use much more than a quarter of the 10Gb that I have available to me. I’ve gone into my listening habits in more detail in the past, but essentially, I carry around one 1Gb playlist, and occasionally toss one or two other specialized playlists on when I’m in a mood to, and that’s it. Right now, I’m currently using a whopping 2.12Gb of my 10Gb iPod for music, leaving around 7Gb free.

Now, say my iPod dies (heaven forbid). The more I think about it, if I do end up in a position where I need to get a new iPod, the iPod mini is perfect for my usage habits. Sure, it’s “only” 4Gb — but when I’m more than content with using just over half that space right now, why should that bother me in the least? I could spend \$50 more than the iPod mini, get the bottom rung iPod, and have 15Gb available…but chances are, I’d still only use around 2Gb of it for music, essentially wasting the other 13Gb. On the other hand, I could spend only \$250 (a full \$150 less than the 10Gb iPod I have now, incidentally), still have about twice the drive space than I’m likely to use, and have a smaller, lighter iPod that does everything that I use mine for now.

Sounds like a damn good deal to me.

So, contrary to my initial opinion, count me fully in the camp of the iPod mini supporters. If my current iPod ever dies — which hopefully won’t happen for quite a while yet — the iPod mini will do quite well for me.

This GarageBand is a hit

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Analysts said they expect Apple’s new GarageBand music creation software to greatly benefit sales of Macs in the coming year. “You look at an application like GarageBand — you can’t get that on another platform at any price,” said Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Media. “People will buy Macs on the basis of GarageBand.” Tim Bajarin, an analyst with market research firm Creative Strategies, also thinks the same. “GarageBand might even have more long-term effect on Apple’s sales [than the new iPod mini],” Bajarin said. “Steve has taken the consumer application layer to its next level from playing music to allowing you to be part of making music.”

(ripped shamelessly from MacMinute)

Even if it…what?

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This little \$20 app is a must-have, even if it weren’t made by Microsoft.

Without meaning any offense at all to John, this statement (and the accompanying implication that any application from Microsoft is a ‘must-have’) made me laugh and cringe equally.

In all fairness, of course, I often (though not always) have much the same opinion about Apple applications and hardware, which may be just as cringe-inducing to people like John. ;)

Macworld SF 2004 Keynote

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9:00: Okay — the keynote stream is up and running. People are filing into their seats to the strains of Elvis over the sound system, and an announcement just came over the speakers giving a three minute warning and asking people to turn off any cell phones and pagers.

9:05: Steve’s onstage.

Over 60,000 viewers watching the QuickTime Webcast.

Talking about the ‘boilerplate’ text on Apple stationary/press releases — Apple ‘reinvented’ the computer in 1984 with the Macintosh — 20 years ago! Looking back on the state of tech in ’84, looking at the original Macintosh.

Laughs at a shot of Bill Gates in the original Mac brochure. ;)

The famous 1984 ad is being shown!

20th Anniversary posters featuring the hammer thrower from the 1984 ad are available at the Keynote.

Re: Mac OS X Panther — “Microsoft’s copying us again, it feels great!”

Going over the various features in Mac OS X.

Over 9.3 Million (40% of the installed Mac base) active Mac OS X users, should cross 10M this quarter. The fastest OS transition on record (3 years).

Final Cut Express 2 launches today. Based on Final Cut 4 tech. Up to 5 DV streams in realtime, effects and transitions in realtime, realtime audio, optimized for Panther and the G5. Richard Harris coming onstage to demo FCE2.

Office 2004 is being announced by Roz Ho from MS. Kris Barton is demoing the new features.

Word: New ‘Notebook View’ for taking notes. Quick Search function built into toolbar (similar to Apple’s built-in search functionality). Note Flags…do something that I can’t summarize easily. ;) Built-in audio recording for recording meetings when you can’t type fast enough.

Excel: Page Layout view in Excel, fully editable, but shows exactly how the spreadsheet will print — analagous to Word’s Layout view. Floating pallete for page formatting updates the Layout view live.

Entourage: Project Center (available in all Office programs, being demoed in Entourage). Looks to be a project manager that ties all various pieces together into a single ‘project’.

Roz again, announcing a Technology Gaurantee Program. Starting today, if you purchase MS Office X, you’ll get a free upgrade to Office 2004 when it’s released. She’s giving her thanks, and is done.

Steve’s back on stage, talking about the G5. Affirming again that the G5 is the roadmap for the future of Mac processors (maybe this will finally kill the ‘move to Intel’ rumors). Talking about Virginia Tech — apologizing for shipping the first 1,100 G5 dual processor machines to VT and “pissing off some other customers.” Comparing the top three supercomputers power and price, VT comes in at #3, over 10 terraflops for 5.2 million dollars. Showing a video of the VT supercomputer center.

Announcing the G5-based XServe!

1-U form factor. Single and dual 2.0 Ghz G5 processors. EEC memory up to 8 Gb. Up to 750 Gb storage. A couple other things I missed. All the usual ports. Ships with Panther Server 10.3 and an unlimited client license. 3 models: Server/2.0 Ghz/2999, Server/Dual 2.0 Ghz/3999, Compute Node/2.0 Ghz/2999.

Xserve RAID also updated. Going over the Xserve RAID specs. New features: up to 3.5 Terrabytes storage in a 3U rack. SFP Fibre Channel connectors. RAID set slicing. I have no idea what some of this means. On the fly RAID set expansion. Audience is applauding, these are probably good things. ;)

Xserve RAID certified for OS X. Win 2k3 Server, XP pro, and 2 versions of Linux. 3 versions of Xserve Raid (1, 1.75, and 3TB, works out to about \$3 per Gigabyte at the high end).

Moving to iTunes. 30M songs purchased since April 28, tens of millions of songs ahead of the competitors. Almost 1.9 million songs per week. Neilsen SoundScan puts iTMS at 70% of the online legal downloads. “Feels great to get above that 5%, doesn’t it?” The top spender on the iTMS has spent \$29,500! Over 50,000 AudioBooks sold since their introduction. Over 100,000 gift certificates sold since October. AOL integration is complete. iTunes Essentials compilations going well.

Announcing Billboard Hot 100 charts from 1946 to the present (wow!). More Billboard charts will come over the quarter, for various genres. Adding over 12,000 classical tracks today. Now over 500,000 songs available for download and purchase today. iTMS now the largest online music store in the world.

Going over the Pepsi/iTMS promotion beginning Feb. 1st, during the Superbowl. 1 in 3 yellow-capped Pepsi bottles will be winners of a free song from the iTMS, 100 million free songs total.

Moving to iLife. iLife ’04 debuts today — “Microsoft Office for the rest of your life.”

Includes latest version of iTunes. Everything seamlessly integrated.

iPhoto: #1 feature of iPhoto ’04 — supports up to 25,000 photos without waiting (finally!). Time-based organization. Smart albums (like iTunes smart playlists). Photo ratings and enhancements. Slideshows enhanced. Rendevouz photo sharing (“no copyright issues with sharing photos!”).

Demoing iPhoto with 25,093 photos. Scrolling through and resizing w/no lag. Performance improved dramatically w/special effects. Automatically sorts albums by year (four most recent, plus ‘early photos’). New album called ‘Last 12 months’, this can be adjusted to whatever time period you want. Smart Albums are almost identical to Smart Playlists in iTunes — very nice! Rating and simple editing commands built into the slideshow for on-the-fly adjustments of newly imported photo albums. Slideshows now have more options, integrated with iTunes to use playlists for background music. New transitions between slides, including the “cube” transition that Fast User Switching uses.

Peter Lowe coming onto stage to demo Rendevouz photo sharing. Peter’s photo library automatically pops up on Steve’s mac. Steve’s buying “Come Go With Me” from the iTMS, chooses it in iPhoto for the slideshow music (with a live search field), and starts a slideshow with Peter’s pictures streamed wirelessly from Peter’s Powerbook.

Printed photo albums available in Japan now, Europe later this month.

iMovie 4: Trim clips directly in Timeline, alignment guides for video and audio, new and enhanced titles, import video directly from an iSight, sharing movies made easier.

Demoing iMovie 4. Nice new title effects, including a “Star Wars” style scroller. New “Share” menu item that automatically converts and compresses video clips, uploads them to a .Mac iDisk and makes it available on the Internet for viewing.

iDVD: 20 new themes added to already existing themes, enhanced menus, enhanced slideshows, DVD navigation map, pro encoding up to 2 hours on a DVD with high quality encoding, archiving projects allows DVDs to be built on a machine without a DVD burner, then moved to a machine that can create the DVD.

Demoing iDVD. Showing some of the new themes and transitions.

New 5th iLife App: GarageBand. Pro music tool “for everyone”. Gives recording studio capabilities to all Macs. Gives recording studio capabilities to all Macs. Digitally mix up to 64 tracks, play up to 50 software instruments through a USB or Midi keyboard, over 1000 professional loops, record live audio performances, over 200 pro-quality audio effects, vintage and modern guitar amps — plug an electric guitar directly into the Mac and get the right sound.

John Mayer on stage to demo GarageBand. Being audio-based, it’s a bit hard to summarize how the demo goes, but this is damn cool. John played a MIDI keyboard to demo several of the built-in instruments, and mentioned that the guitar is the first synthetic guitar to sound like the real thing, including bends and string noise. Steve’s now demoing some of the various loops available for assembling tracks from pre-recorded pieces.

John’s now playing a guitar to demo the various built-in guitar amps.

Steve’s pulled up a project file with a bunch of loops already set up for a backing track, John’s going to record a lead guitar track, letting it record as the pre-set pieces play.

(Interesting side note while they’re recording this bit — GarageBand seems to have a darker, more “stereo equipment” brushed metal finish to it, dark grey, almost black, though it’s a little hard to tell with the quality of the QuickTime stream. More user interface screams and cries coming up?)

GarageBand has an “export to iTunes” command that automatically converts a finished track to an encoded AAC file and places it in a GarageBand playlist.

What would this cost on the Windows Market? Musicmatch Plus (iTunes): \$29. Adobe Photoshop Album (iPhoto): \$49. Pinnacle Studio 8 (iMovie/iDVD): \$99. Cakewalk (GarageBand): \$100something. Total: over \$300. iLife on the Mac: \$49 and free with every new Mac.

Companion Products: JamPack for GarageBand, over 100 more instruments, over 2000 more loops, 15 more guitar amps, over 100 more effects presets: \$99, also available Jan. 16th. Apple will also be selling a 49-key USB keyboard for \$99.

Playing a promo video for the iLife suite now (and Lane, I’m also very curious about downloads, esp. for iPhoto which has been bugging me for ages now, but \$49 isn’t bad at all for all of this).

Last up: the iPod. Last quarter, sold 730,000 between Oct. and Dec. 2 millionth iPod sold sometime in December. Market share in terms of all .mp3 players as of November, Apple had a 31% market share of units, and 55% share of revenue, #1 spot world wide — Dec. revenues should push this even higher.

10Gb model being updated to 15Gb for the same \$299 price, starting today. New in-ear headphones from Apple for \$39. Introducing a new ad in the same style as previous iPod ads.

Looking more closely at the iPod market share. About 60% of the total market is flash-based players that sell for around the \$100 level. Apple wants to go after the higher-end low-capacity .mp3 player market. Emphasizing the low storage capacity for the cost — we’ve got to be leading up to the miniPod.

Bingo — introducing the 2nd member of the iPod family: iPod mini. 4Gb storage capacity, stores around 1,000 songs, half inch thick (and roughly the dimensions of a business card), \$249 (ooh — that’s more than people were expecting/hoping for — expect lots of grousing about that).

Uses the same UI as the full-size iPod, added the menu/play buttons directly onto the scroll-wheel, supports both Firewire and USB2, battery can be charged from either connector, has the same dock/cable connector on the bottom as the full-size. Has its own dock, also comes with an armband for jogging. Comes in five colors, uses anodized aluminum finish. Ships next month in the US, ships in April worldwide.

Steve’s emphasizing that the iPod mini is going after the high end of the low-capacity .mp3 market. He must know the price could be a bone of contention.

He’s wrapping up everything he talked about over the course of the keynote. Steve’s mentioned a couple times that there are more good things coming from the G5 line this year — looks like no speed bumps at Macworld, but if past cycles are any indication, it’s a good possibility for the next few months.

And that’s it!

Wrapup: the updated Xserve and Xserve raid were sorely needed and should be very popular for that market, the updated iLife suite is sweet and should have a lot of people drooling, and the biggest news on the iPod mini will be the price — no matter how happy people are about having the smaller player available, and no matter how cool it is, too many people were hoping for the \$100 price point. At this point, the 15Gb full-size iPod is only \$50 more than the 4Gb iPod mini…is this really going to go over well? Only time will tell, I suppose, but I have to say that I’m fairly skeptical. It’ll be a bit sketchy as to whether the smaller form factor and colors will be enough of a draw to offset the reduced capacity.