Big news of the day, of course, is Steve Jobs’ keynote address at Macworld 2006. I just got home from school and watched the 2. Here’s the key points (plus occasional commentary from me here and there):
Technology
Things that catch my geeky interests that don’t fall into a more specific tag.
Bad UI: Mozilla Thunderbird
I’m honestly not entirely sure if I should be grumbling at Mozilla’s authors or Windows’ authors, but this drives me up the wall:
Those last two options are way too close together. If the only places for them to go are the last two items on the contextual menu, could there at least be a seperating line between them? I’m just glad Control-Z works after delete operations, or I’d be in a world of hurt, far more often than I’d like to admit.
(Admittedly, this is somewhat compounded with my having to use a mouse on the work computer instead of the tablet that I use at home, which is far easier, more comfortable, and accurate…but I still think this is a bad thing.)
Webpage Screenshots on OS X
One of the perpetual “how am I going to do this?” questions that will pop up from time to time when working with websites is how to get a screenshot of an entire webpage. Most of the time it’s not at all easy to do, and unless you’ve stumbled across some specialized software, involves taking a screenshot of however much fits on your screen, scrolling down, taking another, repeating until you’ve captured it all, and then stitching the images together in Photoshop.
Enter Paparazzi for OS X: give it a URL and dimensions, and get a single image of the entire page. Quick, simple, and occasionally very handy.
A sample image follows behind the cut…
Old Technology
Does anyone out there have any need for an official Windows 2000 Professional install CD, complete with serial number? Update: Eight minutes later, it’s spoken for. You people scare me. ;)
As part of an initial stab at starting to weed out the junk from my apartment in preparation for my upcoming move, I’ve finally given up on any hope of resurrecting the PC that’s been doing nothing more than holding my desk down for the last year and junked it. This leaves me with the OS install disc, which is useless to me.
Admittedly, in these days of XP and the upcoming Longhorn Vista (in, what, another three years or something?), a Win2kPro install probably isn’t that valuable even to Windows users. Even so, I thought I’d toss this out there just on the off chance someone could use it. First come, first serve, just let me know where to mail it and I’ll send it your way.
If I don’t get a taker in, oh, a week or so, I’ll just toss it.
“Love Your Enemies” by Burroughs, William S. from the album Dead City Radio (1990, 1:13).
We Are the Web
This month’s Wired has what is likely not just the best article I’ve seen come out of Wired in a long time, but the best piece I’ve seen in ages on the Web, where it’s been, and where it may be headed in the future.
Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.
Dissonance in Liability
Ganked this one straight from Daily Kos, via Boing Boing:
WARNING: Severe Cognitive Dissonance Ahead!
Hollywood wins Internet piracy battle
The U.S. Supreme Court rules against file-sharing service Grokster in a closely watched piracy case.NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled [last month] that software companies can be held liable for copyright infringement when individuals use their technology to download songs and movies illegally.
[Hollywood’s] victory [last month]…dealt a big blow to technology companies, which claim that holding them accountable for the illegal downloading of songs, movies, video games and other proprietary products would stifle their ability to develop new products.
“We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties,” Justice Souter wrote.
Wait for it… wait for it…
Senate Moves to Shield Gun Industry
WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans on Tuesday moved the National Rifle Association’s top priority ahead of a $491 billion defense bill, setting up a vote on legislation to shield firearms manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits over gun crimes.
“The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “We look at it from a standpoint of stopping lawsuit abuse.”
The bill would prohibit lawsuits against the firearms industry for damages resulting form the unlawful use of a firearm or ammunition.
[Senator Larry] Craig said such lawsuits are “predatory and aimed at bankrupting the firearms industry,” unfairly blaming dealers and manufacturers for the crimes of gun users.
Got that? If a company makes a product that is inappropriately used to illegally copy a movie, that company is liable. If a company makes a product that is inappropriately used to illegally kill a human, that company is not liable. What’s the common logic holding these disparate concepts together? Massive corporate special interest money. Welcome to your government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, where a pirated copy of “Hollywood Homicide” is bigger threat than an actual Hollywood homicide.
This is such a crock. How soon until I can afford to bail from this bass-ackwards country?
“
“No One is Fax Exempt” by Rollins, Henry from the album Think Tank (1998, 19:28).
It’s a hoax! No, it was a hoax. Now it’s real.
This amused me greatly.
Compare and contrast:
- Photos of the internals of an Apple Intel Development Box.
-
The infamous G5-to-PC mod hoax that had lots of people up in arms in January of 2004.
He wasn’t hoaxing — he was predicting! He’s a genius!
Initial thoughts
Some brief initial thoughts on today’s news…
- There’s a rousing snowball fight going on in hell right now.
-
IBM just got spanked. Hard.
-
From a user-standpoint, this may not be as big of a deal as some might fear. Apple has plenty of past experience dealing with potentially difficult and disastrous transitions. Most recently, of course, the OS transition from OS 9 to the UNIX-based OS X; more applicable to this situation, however, is their earlier switch from the Motorola 680×0 processors to the IBM/whoever-else-was-involved (I’m on lunch and trying to post this quickly, so I’m not looking up all the little details) PowerPC processors.
From my standpoint, both prior switches were handled quite well. With the number of ways that things could break, it’s amazing how much didn’t. Case in point, just this weekend I downloaded the game Crystal Crazy from the Macintosh Garden, a repository for “abandonware”. This is a game that was written for 680×0 systems, so it’s outdated by many years, one software transition, and one hardware transition…and it still works. Granted, the sound doesn’t work, and it has to be run from the disk image instead of being copied directly to the hard drive, but the fact that it works at all (680×0 code running through the PowerPC emulation inside the Classic environment on an OS X system) is a rather resounding testament to the work Apple did in ensuring backwards compatibility — and I have no doubt that they will do everything they can to continue this trend.
-
This certainly doesn’t mean that the Mac is suddenly going to turn into Windows. No matter what kind of processor is providing the underlying power, it’s OS X that is the heart and soul of the Mac “experience”, and that’s not going to change (well, not beyond future OS upgrades that is).
-
I think it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll start seeing “install anywhere” OS X boxes that will allow OS X to be installed on any random x86-based system. Much of what makes a Mac a Mac is the tight integration between the OS and known, Apple-approved system components, and I don’t see them giving that up and attempting to support the nearly-infinite possible hardware configurations of homebrew PCs. The processor may be going to Intel, but that doesn’t preclude Apple from keeping tight control of their motherboards and keeping OS X on their proprietary hardware.
That said, I expect plenty of hackers will be doing everything possible to circumvent that. It’ll be interesting to see how successful they are, and how soon they pull it off.
-
I expect that Virtual PC will be undergoing a major shift in a couple years, possibly moving to something closer to the fabled ‘Red Box‘ of the Rhapsody years. No more emulation layer to worry about — Windows will be able to run native code on the Intel processors that it’s written for, at full speed. In theory (and this is definitely theory, as I’m no programmer), all VPC would really have to do is create an isolated virtual machine for Windows to run inside, much like the Classic layer already does for pre-OS X applications. Perhaps we could even see Windows apps running outside of the VPC window, side-by-side with OS X and Classic applications? It’d be a UI nightmare, sure, but it might not be outside the realm of possibility anymore.
-
I can’t wait until I get off work and can really dive into all the various analysis and speculation after this. I’m going to have a lot of reading to do tonight!
Any other thoughts?
Slashdot Slashdotted
Here’s an amusing little something that I’d never seen before. I tried to take a look at a Slashdot story about the Apple/Intel switch, when…
Apparently everybody was trying to get to that story, and for once, Slashdot couldn’t keep up! Pretty impressive, and an indicator of just how big this news is.
“My Dark Life” by Costello, Elvis/Eno, Brian from the album X-Files, The: Songs In the Key of X (1996, 6:20).
Mac moving to Intel
Wow. It’s true.
Short on details at the moment, as the keynote is still going on, and I’m just watching the MacRumors updates, but…Apple is moving to Intel for their processors.
Wow.