It’s always inspiring to read about great people and their great stories. In Steve Wozniak’s case, it’s interesting to see how HP has stayed a stubborn and old-fashioned company since the 70s. HP could have been Apple (and there’d never be an Apple), but it screwed up…. Not that they’ll ever admit that they regret passing on Woz’s designs for the original Apple I and Apple II, but it’s pretty clear that some company cultures stink and will always stay that way…
Category: Apple
Safari Still Unbearable
After ditching Firefox for Safari less than 48 hours ago, I am back using Firefox again. Safari’s memory leak was simply unbearable. After doing some surfing on how to boost both Safari and Firefox’s performance as well as reduce potential for memory leaks, I came across this nifty command line to check leaks:
For Safari, in the command prompt, run
2
3
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7
Process 16320: 296847 nodes malloced for 47252 KB
Process 16320: 56 leaks for 6176 total leaked bytes.
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(lines and lines or error codes)For Firefox, run
2
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Process 16320: 309998 nodes malloced for 47750 KB
Process 16320: 111 leaks for 3440 total leaked bytes.
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(lines and lines of error codes)
When
1 | leaks Safari |
was executed, the error codes ran for pages and pages in the command prompt. It was so long that the command prompt’s buffer ran out of memory (and only after I piped the errors to a text file did I find out that the error code generated a 20MB plain text file!!). And that was after I launched Safari fresh with 10 tabs. In comparison, Firefox’s error code was only a few mouse scrolls away. On top of that, after only having used Safari for less than 12 hours yesterday, I watched it gobbling up almost 200MB of RAM where as in Firefox, I can go on for days with keep the memory occupancy at less than 135MB. Again, this was all with about 10 tabs opened simultanously at all times.
After I decided to quit Safari (again), I closed the windows one by one after transfering all the pages to Firefox. And it gave me this error:
The following world leaks were detected (the check is done when all browser windows are closed):
2 WebView objects, 1 WebFrame object, 1 WebDataSource object, 1 WebFrameView object, 1 WebHTMLRepresentation object, 1 WebBridge object, 2 JavaScript interpreters.
Please write a bug report about this, along with reproducible steps if possible.
Supposedly Finder and almost everything else leaks memory as well… But I am surprised the OS holds up so well after having gone weeks (sometimes months) without a reboot… I wonder how XP and/or other OSes and their Desktops/X hold up against leaks. But I have never heard of Linux having to restart from crashes or bad memory leaks. And OSX has been pretty stable for the past 3.5 years in various versions I have been using. So Windows must just suck more then?
Argh… memory leaks are annoying…
The World of Advertisement
I went to the ATM today to deposit some checks. As soon as I approached the teller machine, I was like, “WTF! What is that huge 7-11 sticker doing on the floor?” It turns out that 7-11 has a marketing deal going with Citibank. Not only is the tiny area in front of the teller plastered with a 7-11 smoothie, the touch screen of the machine is also polluted with 7-11 ads and catch phrase. Just before I thought this experience couldn’t be worse, my printed receipt from the ATM was also littered with stuff from 7-11…
Introducing the ATMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
7-ELEVEN now has Citibank ATMs.
Go to Citibank.com to find the location nearest you.
O~kay… I guess that’s good to know.
Now I can’t even get my own my money in a peace and quiet manner. As if Citibank isn’t doing me enough favor by squeezing every possible dollar out of my bank account, they want to also make money by selling me ads….
It feels like ads are all over the place now. They are between half-time breaks of professional sports games (“This half time break brought to you by Budwiser” ), half-time scores announcements (“This half time score brought to you by “AT&T” ), shopping carts…. everywhere. And now they are even on the ATM machines and printed receipts. What next? Toll booths and gasoline receipts (well, they ARE all over the back of Safeway’s receipts)? Or, ahem, blogs?
This kind of stuff makes me appreciate Apple and Macs even more. Allow me explain why.
When I had to buy a Dell years ago (stupid 3D modeling), I had to sign up an account with them. It’s been almost 5 years, I am STILL getting emails from Dell about their special deals despite of my opting out (can I sign up somewhere to sue them?). When I got the computer, there were endorsed trial services and softwares all over the computer! AOL, Earthlink, this or that financial services, this or that trial software… The computer was literally littered with stuff I didn’t want and didn’t ask for. So the first thing I did was reformat the hard drive and install only stuff I wanted. But when I had to support 10-15 Dell computers, it was a nightmare.
Fast forward to the day I got my PowerBook from Apple. I powered up the computer; I made an account; it asked if I had an ISP, if not, whether I wanted to sign one up with Earthlink. DONE. No more ads, trial software, advertising garbage. Nothing.
It’s been almost four years since I got the PowerBook, I have yet to receive a single piece of junk mail from Apple. I will take a company that does not compromise the integrity of its customers’ information v.s. another that treats it as another dollar sign any day, even if it means I have to pay a slight premium over the former’s products and services (all this is beside the point that Apple simply makes superior products).
Can the PC Industry Survive Apple’s Boot Camp?
Apple never seizes to amaze the high tech industry with its top secrecy of projects and strategies. While most of us hardcore Apple and Steve Jobs fan weren’t surprised, Apple sent another shock wave into the PC galaxy with its introduction of Boot Camp.
The Mac-friendly cluster of the media thinks this is an ingenius idea on Apple’s part to have a trojan horse in the PC world to give the Mac-shy PC buyers no more reason to buy another box from Dell, HP or the like. And by doing so, since Mac OSX is already pre-installed, there’s no reason NOT to try an use it. Hence the great victory of the trojan. The same media cluster also thinks that since Apple is still a hardware company at heart, this strategy will help drive Apple’s hardware sales off the roof (somebody lend me $3000 for some AAPL shares!).
And of course there are also some doomsday predications. Some people think this will spend the end of Mac OSX as we know it. Why would developers want to invest the resources in developing anything for Mac OSX when Windows can also run on Macintosh hardware? This would also erode Apple’s own software business!
I told Murdza that maybe this is the final duel — Steve Jobs is now openly challenging the world to come and see what Mac and Mac OSX are made of. They are confident in saying that, “Look, we think our sh*t is so good that we will even HELP YOU run our competitor’s software on our hardware. And you know what? You will swtich.”
I foresee a lot of dual boots in the coming months. But perhaps the true ingenious of this strategy is still not revealed to the public. Once Boot Camp becomes part of Apple’s next release of operating system (should be due out first quarter of 2007), many of us think that maybe Apple will make it so that Windows will run side by side with Mac OSX without any kind of rebooting, having Windows run at near-native speed, like Mac Classic did under OSX for a couple of years (Darwine comes to mind). Now, THAT would kick ass!
More Safari Woes
So Safari does suck (a little)… A serious flaw has been discovered.
And I thought I was the only person crashing it like Bush is crashing the U.S. national debt.
Steve’s Play Ground
Sometimes being stubborn can really pay off big time, especially if you have the will to drive that stubbornness through walls. Steve Jobs did just that and then some.
Murdza reminded me of an article that Vanityfair is running on Steve Jobs and the 30th anniversary of Apple Computer. It’s a pretty long read with lots of comparative analysis to modern cultural icons. I was also surprised by the in-depth disection of the author’s keen observation on the trend o the tech/gadget industry in general…
An excerpt:
One counter-intuitive aspect of Jobs’s media sensibility is that it’s had little to do with content, that great sentimental area of media concern, and everything to do with hardware—the thing that nobody in the American media business has wanted to have anything to do with for two generations. Steve is really an appliance-maker.
And a stubborn one. For most of his career, the rap has been that Jobs missed out on greatness and ubiquity ecause he insisted, unlike the folks at Microsoft, on tying his software to his machines. Perversely, it didn’t seem to matter to him, or even so much to register with him, that, as Windows claimed 97 percent of the P.C. perating-system market, software-is-everything/content-is-king became the market-making truth. His stubbornness here, his blindness, seemed like a business tragedy. Only for a bit of flexibility on Steve’s part, this could have been a Mac rather than a Windows world (ushering in an epoch of peace and happiness).
Except that one day in the near recent past everybody woke up and found out that while all the geniuses were blathering on about content this and content that, the media culture had, in fact, come to be dominated by machines. It’s Steve’s gadget-centric world which we just live in.
iPods, Razr phones, BlackBerrys, plasma screens, Xboxes, TiVos, laptops. Machines are the objects of desire. Machines are the habituating, behavior-changing things. Machines themselves are fascinating, life-enhancing, cool, sexy.
The medium is the message.
This article is so cool that I PDF’d a copy just in case the link disappears (and it almost certainly will). Many have written at length about Steve Jobs, but few offer an observation with a scope that encompasses everything this man is about (even the not-so-flattering stuff).
Mac Uptime
Murdza sent me this image the other day….
That’s 200 days of Mac OSX running without a reboot. I am sure there are machines/OSes that have last longer than that. But it’s impressive nonetheless. I would never want to bet with someone if I had a Windows-based machine to be up and running for that kind of up time.
Murdza, don’t you ever apply OSX updates that Apple issues? They almost certainly require reboots!
iPod the Cultural Icon
You know your product is a cultural icon when it’s mentioned repeatedly on the airplane before take off.
For the first time, I heard the name “iPod” mentioned among the list of items to turn off as flight attendents prepared the plane for take off during my trip to Savannah. But that was just with US Airways. And I found it interesting that they didn’t even bother with the category of MP3 players, but quite simply, “iPod”.
I don’t blame them. I paid careful attention to the kinds of portable players being used by other travelers during the entire trip. And it’s a very strang phenomenon to see only iPods for anyone who’s got a portable player. The ONLY exception was this one dude with all of his CD collections in one giant CD sleeve with his retro CD player sitting next to me on the flight back to San Jose. Where has this guy been in the past three years?
It’s scary to see how far and deep iPod has reached in the war of MP3 players and digital music. But at the same time, it’s also kind of comforting.
What if Microsoft Redesigned Apple iPod Packaging?
via [MacDailyNews]
Steve Jobs Surprises the World with New Mac OSX
If you liked “Napolean Dynamite“, you may like this…
Thanks to Brian for the picture… You are such a dork.
Old School Keynote Speeches from Steve Jobs
Murdza sent me this pretty neat link to some classic keynotes of Steve Jobs back in the days…. The one in 1997, his return to Apple, was probably one of the best ones. He pretty much laid out the road map that Apple has been doing, except at the time it all sounded like secret codes that only he and the Apple board understood.
For you diehard Steve Jobs fans, this is a great place to collect those speeches that you’ve always regretted not having a copy of (I know Murdza and I now have a copy!). For you new comers to the Mac, this was the Second Coming of Steve Jobs…
OH, and the site also has pretty much all the classic Apple commercials from the old days… Fun!
UPDATE 02.27.2006: Another site filled with Appple ads.
Multi-Touch Interaction Experiment Gone Mad
We all have seen Tom Cruise in that futuristic science-ficition thriller set in the not-too-distant future, “Minority Report“. Remember the scene where he goes through hundreds of video archives looking for that segment of evidence to arrest someone of a “pre-crime”?
Well, I guess maybe that’s not too science-fiction after all… The clip shown below demonstrates what’s called a “Multi-Touch Interaction” technology for touch screens. Most touch screens today can only accept one user input at a time. But this new technology recognizes and is able to interpret multiple user inputs at any given time.
Apple has reportedly applied for a patent that covers similar technology.