Geek Stuff – Page 16

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 Evils of Microsoft

An excerpt from Cringely on behalf of PBS:

There was a time when Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, was the boss at Microsoft. When it came time to visit Albuquerque to demonstrate that first BASIC interpreter to the folks at MITs, Allen made the trip, not Gates. It was Paul Allen, not Gates, who was later offered the job as head of software for MITs — a job I have in the past characterized as the single most expensive position in the history of employment because accepting that job meant that Allen got only 36 percent of Microsoftâ€™s founders shares, compared to Bill Gatesâ€™ 64 percent.
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But during one of those last long nights of working to finish-up DOS 2.0, something happened. I have heard this story from two people, each of whom was a friend of Allenâ€™s and in a position to know. Each told me the same story the same way. I am not staking my reputation on the accuracy of the story, but I am saying I have it from two good sources. Paul Allen certainly wonâ€™t confirm or deny it, so Iâ€™ll just throw it out for you to consider.

During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die.

Gulp….

This is far worse than the rumor of Steve Jobs pocketing money without Woz’s knowledge.

Are business geniuses inherently evil?

via [MacDailyNews]

Microsoft is A Cry Baby

It’s hard to imagine why people keep using Microsoft products when the alternatives are obviously so much better (except for the poor souls who are locked in to the platform because their preferred software vendors, ahem, Autodesk, don’t know any better). Here’s another reason why Microsoft is really, truly, incredibly evil.

Worst yet, the U.S. government is playing into Microsoft’s hands for something that is clearly a punishment for Microsoft’s own antitrust behaviors. Double standards?

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.

Fulltime Firefox

I have written about using Firefox and how to solve its memory leak problems. The trick I wrote about by limiting the “history” of previous pages on any given tab has been working magics in reducing the memory sneak-up on Firefox. Ever since I reduced the recorded history, the overall memory usage on Firefox has stayed at around 70MB to 150MB, mostly somewhere in between. But it is slow like a dog despite of me turning off many of the unused extensions.

After having used Firefox fulltime for the past several months, the occasional trip back to Safari makes Firefox feel like public transit, slow and dirty. I have been pondering on going back to Safari, but the fact that there are NO remedies to combat its memory leak issues makes me feel reluctant. Having 10 tabs opened at any given time all the time is not a small feat for just any browser, and Firefox has been able to handle it rather gracefully. If it were Safari, the damn thing would have blown up in 3 days, taking the Finder with it sometimes.

Maybe I will give Camino another shot now that I know how to control memory issues…

Blah…

Just another rant on browsers…

42

It turns out that 42 is the answer to life and the universe.

An excerpt…

There is an important sequence of numbers called “the moments of the Riemann zeta function.” Although we know abstractly how to define it, mathematicians have had great difficulty explicitly calculating the numbers in the sequence. We have known since the 1920s that the first two numbers are 1 and 2, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that mathematicians conjectured that the third number in the sequence may be 42â€”a figure greatly significant to those well-versed in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

It would also prove to be significant in confirming the connection between primes and quantum physics. Using the connection, Keating and Snaith not only explained why the answer to life, the universe and the third moment of the Riemann zeta function should be 42, but also provided a formula to predict all the numbers in the sequence. Prior to this breakthrough, the evidence for a connection between quantum physics and the primes was based solely on interesting statistical comparisons. But mathematicians are very suspicious of statistics. We like things to be exact. Keating and Snaith had used physics to make a very precise prediction that left no room for the power of statistics to see patterns where there are none.

via [Slashdot]

New Google Search Interface

I have not done a “Geek”, I mean, truly dorky geeky, entry for weeks. So here it goes…

Apparently Google has been working on a new user interface for its famously simple (read: bland but fast) user interface. For months, I have noticed Grace’s Camino browser always produces a different Google UI. At first I thought that’s one of those perks Camino offers as a browser. But now I know it’s probably some kind of deal struck by the Camino project and Google to test out the new UI.

If you are anxious to try out the new Google UI, Ars Technica has a hack, which I will go over below.

New Google UI under Camino
This is the new Google UI I have been seeing on Camino.

New Google UI after the Javascript tweak
This is the new UI after a one-line tweaking on your browser…

Here’s how you will get the new Google UI according to Ars Technica.

1. Go to Google using any browser
2. In the address bar of your browser, copy/paste the following code in ONE LINE with no spaces (this could mean copy/paste 3 separate times):

1
2
3
javascript:alert(document.cookie="PREF=ID=fb7740f
107311e46:TM=1142683332:LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljX
TzvL3dWu;path=/;domain=.google.com")

3. Hit enter and click on “OK” on the message that appears.
4. Start searching and enjoy the new UI!

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 hardwareâ€”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).

Collecting Pixar’s Stock Certificates

I cam across this article on the craze that’s going on with people flocking to collect Pixar’s stock certificates. It’s reported that once Pixar and Disney have completed their merger, Pixar will stop issuing their colorful and playful stock certificates (which then becomes a collector’s item immediately).

This article has more details on the whole charade.

Here’s an image of the “actual” stock certificate:

(Image courtesy of WHACO.com)

via [MacDailyNews]

UPS — the Ultimate Cost Savings Machine

Murdza sent me a crazy interview with the CIO of UPS, Dave Barnes, about what UPS is doing to cut costs in optimizing its world wide shipping operations. If you are an efficiency-freak like Murdza, this is the video for you.

I think Murdza just found a new idol besides Steve “the God” Jobs.

Mac Uptime

Murdza sent me this image the other day….

Mac: 200 days without reboot

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!

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Brian and I got into a pretty lengthy discussion about “limitations” certain governments placed on the idea of “Freedom of Speech” over Skype. This came about when some moron in Germany (or was it Austria?) got arrested for preaching that Holocaust never happened. Apparently it’s illegal to deny this very historical fact.

Brian thinks there shouldn’t be any limitations at all on freedom of speech. The government should have used abundance of true information to fight dis-information. While I agreed with most of his points, I thought maybe it’s a good idea of have some oversight to ensure certain “facts” will remain factual for futural generations (as opposed to having even a shred of doubt about the integrity of that “fact” ). Or else you end up with something like Japan to whom the Rape of Nanking never took place. And when enough people buy into the idea and gathers enough momentum, dis-information just might overtake the facts, and that very dis-information may become the “fact” that it just replaced.

In the context of social engineering and group dynamics, Clay Shirky thinks that certain amount of moderation is always a good idea in light of what programmers have learned from the early days of the Internet. He argues that when freedom of speech is truly “free”, online communities always fail and burn in chaos. There are certain kinds of behavioral traits in humans that will always surface. So in essence, there can probably never be true freedom of speech for as long as the humans are in charge of things. Without the rules of law, can civilized socieities stay civilized? Based on the findings of online forums Clay Shirky cited, the short answer is NO.

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