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Great Scott it is Christmas, and here we are this week with a Post article aimed at people thinking of buying Macs. Next week, we will cover the smaller stuff.
Apples for Xmas and New Year
Slow internet speeds at the end of last week, and perhaps for a week or more to come, have been blamed on disruption to three cables in the Mediterranean that carry a lot of traffic between Europe and the Indian sub-continent. Of course, with the way the internet was designed with its packet switching system, the data tries to find alternative routes, so this may well have shifted a lot more traffic to the Pacific routes. I was checking the speeds for another reason on Friday and was surprised to find that while the internal link speeds were good, outside Thailand was down to about 30% of what it should be.
Having finally dropped my Inet mail account -- have you seen the share price? -- I decided that as I had finally paid for it, I should setup the MobileMe mail access fully in Mail. I had delayed this as the process is a bit long-winded as Mail goes through its digital negotiations with the servers and True. You also need to have full account details handy. Not this time. I started the process by selecting MobileMe in the add account section and saw a Quick Assist method, so clicked Yes. Of course, all the information is online with my account in the cloud and it took all of 30 seconds to set it all up. Nice that.
While I worry sometimes about my students lack of knowledge and curiosity, they do have some excuse; and once they have me, they are aware that Macs and OS X exist. Rixstep put me onto a review in The Register, entitled "The Year in Operating Systems: No battle of big ideas" one would have certain expectations of what might or might not be included, but you might be wrong.
Timothy Prickett Morgan, who is an IT expert, manages to go through his entire 7-page look back -- and look ahead -- with zero mention of Cupertino. The guys at the register did list two Apple articles in their Related Stories section at the end, but apart from that and a first paragraph use of "upsetting the entire apple cart", that was it.
On Tuesday evening, one of my students sent me a message on MSN suggesting a Itry the URL iphonenano DOT com. When I did, it redirected me to the iPhone pages at Apple. As Dennis Sellers wrote (I sent him the information), make of it what you will.
A couple of weeks ago the Blackberry Storm was released to a resounding thud in some quarters, although some critics tried their best to be nice. Not so the customers: and why should they. We hear that some are returning the Blackberry Storm. OK, as Silicon Alley Insider writes, they return the iPhone too, but this seems a bit early, especially with the accompanying online chatter.
On the other hand, Apple Insider reports that RIM Blackberry sales are going quite well and matching sales of iPhones.
With the Mac I use something called Undercover to track the device should it be stolen. This was proved to work with my PowerBook when that was stolen although we never got it back: too late. It has appeared online since but only for moments. Someone still has it and my data IS still intact after almost 2 years. There is however, nothing for the iPhone or iPod touch. One user who lost an iPhone had some luck as synchronisation with MobileMe was active. The thief of course used the device and began to add contacts which appeared on the owner's home computer. With a bit of persuasion, and a bit of gall I should think, one of the contacts was persuaded to give information which lead to the thief and an arrest. The iPhone was auctioned on eBay and he got $450 for it.
SimCity which I had on my last PC, my Palm and then on my eMac has now been released for iPhone and iPod touch at $9.99 (350 baht).
I am afraid I went ahead and bought this.
As a former UK policemen, the next item made me angry. An officer, now ex-officer, in the Metropolitan Police, not only abused his position by accessing a police database for personal reasons, he then blackmailed people using that information for sums around 20,000 to 30,000 pounds. He is of course now doing time.
The RIAA has at last given up chasing and suing ordinary consumers for downloading music. Terry McBride has a lot to do with this and had provided support to some of those being sued. He is interviewed about this, and comments on that interview are on a UK website as well as the video with the podcast page this week.
Apple has produced a somewhat useful Business resources site which has links to pages and PDFs that will be helpful for a number of users.
The Four S company that has almost-nightly gatherings on the ground outside my house while the disk-making machines churn out the product silently in a back office, may have bought the house immediately next door. They were tidying up the yard this weekend. Time to move methinks.
Intel has produced a handheld computer called the Classmate and, as the name suggests, it is aimed at students. Looks OK from the front but the sides are a bit if a mucky design. It comes with Windows and I am pretty sure it has a touch screen, but that needs stylus. Gizmodo has a fairly positive review.
Interesting are some of the icons shown on the screen. There are four of note: a camera icon that is identical to the iPhoto icon; pen input method which looks like the Applescript icon; Movie Maker which is like the iMovie icon; and Calculator which is pretty generic anyway. One other application I noted was ArtRage, which is pretty good on the Mac too.
With MacWorld just around the corner, it may be no coincidence that Sony intend to announce a new Vaio on 9 January, a couple of days after Apple's announcements. That is, according to the New Zealand site.
I checked the Thai site and the US site but neither has a thing as yet.
I am going to be looking at MacWorld rumours soon, but information suggests that there could be a new Mac mini and iMac, plus an interesting development for the Mighty Mouse, which some of us have found is not so mighty after all with the trackball problems. There is a suggestion that the mouse could be made of aluminium with the whole surface using touch technology.
When Apple took over PA Semi and tried to hire Mark Papermaster, an IBM chip expert for the iPod group, we were able to come to some conclusions concerning its own plans for the iPods and iPhones. Following this, last week Apple took a 3.6 per cent stake in Imagination Technologies: a chip developer with an emphasis on graphics. Apple took 8.2m shares at a cost of £3.2m (my source used sterling). This is small change considering what it has in the bank.
I noticed that the MobileMe service was disrupted this week but we now read that Apple had been updating and the service has been improved. During the short break I found that mail in the inbox was missing. It took me a few minutes to remember that I had added MobileMe to the Mail application and that if I deleted messages IN Mail, synchronisation really did mean synchronisation.
At what seems like an unusual moment to me, Apple released an update to the Mail application this week. The information about this tells us it concerns "stability issues" which could cover a host of ills. It should show up in Software Update (it did not in mine run from a user account) and is also available via Apple's download pages.
We also saw that IE had an urgent update this week. Then Redmond warned users that there is an insecurity in its SQL Server line. In addition, XP has received another reprieve. Resellers can still buy licences up to May of next year, when the previous deadline was 31 January. Flexibility is the keyword here we are informed. While a less-than-flexible Microsoft are rumoured to be about to layoff some 6,000 workers come 15 January.
Wall Street Journal has its choices for the best and worst of ads in the last year, noting that budgets are being trimmed and there is a shift to internet advertising. I do hope so, I could do with some of that myself. Why am I not surprised to find that Microsoft campaign with Gates and Jerry Seinfeld cited in the list of worsts?
Bill Fox at Macs Only has been benchmarking OS X since the first release, 10.0 and he is continuing with 10.5.6 the recent upgrade. His fairly lengthy and detailed report confirms that this upgrade has brought back the speed that 10.5.5 lost and this is now a fast OS.
We said a couple of weeks ago how the Nation's RSS feeds had dried up. They did come back, but now the Post is the same. I guess that in both cases, one person responsible has gone away. There was a letter about the feeds in the Post database today, so I am not the only one with questions. A shame, as I rely on news feeds from many sources for quick leads into updating news.
THNIC, the local registrar of domain names has sharpened up its act a bit. A newsletter arrived this week with correct English rather than some of the 50-50 stuff we have seen before, and the email had a direct link to the English web page that contained the text and a link to their latest offer of Thai IN domain names for 199 baht.
but . . . that was all in Thai. Oh well.
A tip on screenshots from Apple this week. Hold down the Command, Shift, and 4 keys, then press the Spacebar. Instead of a cross-hair cursor, a small camera icon appears. When you move this camera icon over the element you’d like to capture, that element is highlighted. Click your mouse or trackpad, and you’ve captured a screenshot of just that element — no further cleanup required.
Along with Google, eBay and Amazon, Apple's shares have been running low lately. With Xmas, Amazon's have begun to rise and I hope that Apple's will too from the current $86 come the New year.
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