Apple

As noted above, Microsoft had "fixed" Vista a long long time before the ads appeared. And as I noted at the time, too, maybe Apple itself should have fixed its own incredibly buggy recent products--MobileMe, iPhone/iPhone 3G, and Leopard among them--instead of hypocritically and falsely calling out a competitor.

Did Apple launch MobileMe poorly? Beyond a doubt. But it seems they got the bugs out of it after a few months. Leopard? Fine on this end and I was an early adopter there. iPhone? I had the original and now a 3G (the applications available brought me back and justify the cost).

Vista? I'm still telling those who buy computers to avoid it if possible and stick with XP.

And advertising budgets? Well, Apple has a hefty markup on the products they sell (unlike, for example, the xbox) so they need to spend that money someplace.

When I attempted to watch the movie, however, the Apple TV displayed an error message: "This content requires HDCP for playback." HDCP (High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) is a form of digital rights management (DRM) that prevents you from playing video over DVI and HDMI connections (in my case) if you don't own compatible hardware that can decode the signal properly. (In other words, HDCP is more crap DRM that does nothing but irritate legitimate customers.) Although I had downloaded the movie legally, my monitor apparently was too old to include HDCP and thus wouldn't display my movie.

Kudos to Apple for refunding his money, though.

Also worth pointing out that anyone who pirated this movie will have no problems watching it whenever they want on whatever hardware they want.

Apple Inc. in a new class-action lawsuit is charged with illegally tying iPods to its iTunes Store in order to forge a monopoly over the digital media market so it can inflate prices, exclude competition, and force consumers to continue to buy into its closed ecosystem.

The one thing Apple does really good is integrate all their products seamlessly. If only they published the specs for all of these integrations so it was an open, level playing field.

Another hit is the aluminum iMac. The 24-inch version—good for prosumers, heck even some professionals, as well as consumers—is, in fact, my favorite Mac desktop ever.

Sorry, this is a miss. It's bad enough that laptop users need to buy a new screen with each new computer they buy, now desktop users too? I've had my Samsung SyncMaster 244T for years now. I'm glad I don't have to keep buying it over and over again.

Note that HTML5 in no way required Ogg (as denoted by the word "should" instead of "must" in the earlier draft). Adding this to the fact that there are widely available patent-free implementations of Ogg technology, there is really no excuse for Apple and Nokia to say that they couldn't in good faith implement HTML5 as previously formulated. Throw your own theory here: DRM, proprietary control, et cetera.

The WHATWG had an opportunity here to eliminate the plugin morass (so 90's) in favor of a baseline format that each browser could implement. Just as HTML specified baseline formats for images (GIF and PNG), this should have been an opportunity to specify baseline free audio and video. And there's still a chance.

Please, please help this issue get more public scrutiny. Use whatever means you deem necessary. Exert pressure on the WHATWG (subscribe now, let your thoughts be read). Don't let special interests kill computing for all — now it’s time to take a stand!

On their mailing list, so far:

• [whatwg] Removal of Ogg is *preposterous*
• [whatwg] Removal off Ogg technology

Though even if the spec were written to reccomend (or even require) Ogg, since when did people actually code their websites to validate? It's been how long since we said "to hell with bad browsers"?

I've been digging into how Apple got Time Machine to work on OS X. I've been using it for two weeks (as opposed to my old rsync the /~ directory solution because I was too lazy to implement a versioned solution) and find it works as advertised so far. My one concern is how Time Machine handles files that change a lot, but in very little ways. First, it's worth pointing out that Time Machine uses what Linux users call hard links:

Backup systems typically make a full clone backup, and then copy only the differential or incremental changes. Differential backups capture everything that has changed since the last full backup, while incremental backups only copy what's changed since the last partial backup. Full backups obviously consume too much disk space to do every hour, but differential or incremental backups don't capture the whole picture in a single shot. Time Machine appears to do both: capture full backups every hour without taking up all the disk space this would require. How does it do this?

An intelligent backup system using differential backups would also have to parse all the various backups done in order to present a composite view of all the partial backups to present the user with the files that can be restored at any given time. The user might want the version of a file from two hours ago, or from two weeks ago. Accommodating this kind of flexibility typically requires managing a complex database of backup file transactions. If that metadata database is lost, restoring files from the backups becomes far more complex, and requires an arduous and lengthly rebuilding of the database.

To solve both problems, Time Machine does something new and different that actually required Apple to make changes to the underlying Mac file system, HFS+. The new change is referred to multi-links, which are similar to "hard links" common to Unix users and potentially available when using NTFS on Windows. Hard links differ from "soft links" (also known as symbolic links), which simply act as placeholders pointing to another file.

Now let's say I've got a large file, such as my iTunes library XML file. Right now it's about 2MB and growing. If I add one track to my library, that file changes and the next backup that is run, the file gets copied over, in it's entirety, to the backup drive. A 2KB change is requiring 2MB of space. I understand that significant resources would be needed to restore a file if it were modified dozens of time. But you're not restoring files daily, you eating up more drive space daily.

I also know that 2MB aggregate over a year isn't going to kill you. But the same would happen to large files. Granted, most people aren't going to be editing large files (read: multimedia), and if they were, one would hope that they'd exclude that directory and manually backup or turn Time Machine off while doing such work. (Don't forget to exclude things like your BitTorrent directory, which would contain constantly changing large files.)

But what if you use encrypted disk images to secure your data? Each DMG file is treated as one big file by Time Machine which means if you have a DMG file that has 100 MB of data and you add a 1 MB image to it, Time Machine will recopy the modified 101 MB DMG file in its entirety and leave the 100 MB DMG file available in all the old backups. It would be great if Time Machine could interact with DMGs on a more advanced level, rather than treating them like simple files. If you only have one or two DMG files with sensitive information, this isn't so bad. But if you use File Vault, your entire home directory is a big fact encrypted DMG.

Certainly worth noting is that the Linux camp has been using things like rsync and rdiff to back things up for years. They ever did have a fancy GUI to get the data back, which is the big selling point of it, but now one is being worked on. Utilizing LVM and rdiff, a differential backup solution with versioning, and a neat GUI tool to see the previous versions is being worked on:

I finally got around to completing this--it's been a busy week. Anyway, I did decide to add revision previewing to this--as such it can preview past revisions of any kind of file which is supported by Konqueror (plaintext documents, word documents, videos, images, etc). It can also restore from any of these previous revisions. Unfortunately, this is not searchable at present--you need to know the name and path of the file you're looking for in order to preview or restore.

TARDIS Video Demo (Ogg Theora, 1440 x 896)

This is really neat! (I've also locally mirrored the TARDIS demo.)

It's articles like this that make me look into buying virtualization software. I'm very not used to having a MAMP stack because managing a LAMP stack, as I have been for years, is worlds easier. Sure Apple has Software Update for the OS and various other software offerings of theres, but how much longer until an all encompassing solution like Debian's (and Ubuntu's) apt software and deb file format?

Leopard’s Finder has a glaring bug in its directory-moving code, leading to horrendous data loss if a destination volume disappears while a move operation is in action. I first came across it when Samba crashed while I was moving a directory from my desktop over to a Samba mount on my FreeBSD server.

Smooth, shiny interfaces mean nothing if the basics can't be done.

The Aperture 1.5.6 Update addresses issues related to performance, improves overall stability, and supports compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Other specific issues addressed in this release include:

• Resolves some minor compatibility issues with iPhoto 7.1, which organizes images by Event rather than Roll.
• Addresses issues related to metadata and sort order when sharing previews with iLife Media Browser.
• Improves reliability of queries based on Import Session.
• Addresses reliability when recovering an Aperture Library from a Vault.

This update is recommended for all Aperture users.

But still no updates to the print products offered.

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Took long enough.

I wonder if it will be open enough for Amazon to sell mp3s directly to it. I bet not.