Category: Apple
So many billions lately. In the Wall Street Journal from this weekend you can read page 16 an interesting story about Steve Jobs. No, not about the iPod or how brilliant he is.
In March his 10 Million Apple shares vest. That would be 800 Million by today’s price.
What’s there not to like?
Well, according to the WSJ, Steve sold shares in 2003. Lot’s of them. When the stock price was on it’s lowest point in five years. He lost 2.5 Billion by doing that.
Chiat/Day: 0 – People: 1
Now that it’s over it might be worth looking at FireWire again. I think there are lessons to be learned if something as smart and nice as FireWire looses against a mix of ‘ok’ replacements.
FireWire is a standard to connect things. Together with DV tape it was supposed to change everything. And interestingly enough it did not. Computers and Video were not exactly an easy match in the early 90s. TVs, recorders, transmissions: it all was analog. Digital processing was simply not fast enough to keep up with 25 or 30 images per second. Machines that could keep up with this onslaught of bits were expensive and complex. So was the connection of the video equipment: You had cables for audio, two of them if stereo, control and one to three for video. And the computer had to do the analog to digital conversion on the way in, and vice versa on the way out.
miniDV and FireWire did change all that. One cable between your camcorder and computer and you are done. Best of all: the data traveled in its native format between tape and computer. No conversion introduced a generation loss. The visual quality of the DV format is amazing, compared to any other consumer format that existed before.
When these solutions entered the market I was convinced that they would change everything. After all it was now amazingly inexpensive to create content of technically good quality. I think that Apple shared some of my enthusiasm: They promoted FireWire but also asked for a 1$ license fee per device. They invested allot into applications that would allow for easy video editing. I think every Mac runs iMovie, and with FireWire you really only need a cable and a camera to start. It is amazingly easy. Yet nobody really does it. People that edit video today probably would have cut super 8 film with a razor blade in the seventies.
Devices get sold. Of course. But there is very little output from this equipment. There are so badly named ‘vlogs’. But just a few thousand, and only few have original content.
There will be a sequel to Clerks. The story goes that Kevin Smith was buying filmstock by loaning money on his credit card. Back in 1994 that’s what you needed to do when you wanted to make a movie. Now you go and pick up a tape for 8 dollars and that’s all you need.
Has it let to an onslaught of new and fresh ideas? When Arri made a small handheld 16 millimeter camera in the 50s it spawned the nouvelle Vague. But what did DV do? Where is the contribution of FireWire? Just because everybody can edit does not mean that everybody can edit.
When FireWire was making things easy I had high hopes in the youth. I thought that there would be a revolution in visual content. That one day I would turn on the TV and would be surprised. I think it was two or three moves ago that I did not bother wiring up the TV set anymore. Finally I sold it, after I dragged it around from place to place.
The FireWire on the latest “MacBook Pro” is half as fast as on the previous PowerBooks. iPods started out with FireWire connections but are USB2 now. The self made porn market has transitioned from Polaroid over Video to phone cams.
Firewire is a thing of the past. People don’t really want to edit video it seems. For years video editing has been amazingly simple on Mac’s, and weird and cumbersome on Windows. But its market share seemed unfazed. The iPod and the constant Windows, malware malaise did what FireWire/Video could never accomplish.
I would have bet money on the opposite. Glad I did not.
Just added ten more Terrabytes to the Xsan. When republishing the volume via afp on a OS X 10.4 server box I had to:
sharing -a /path/to/volume
serveradmin stop afp
serveradmin start afp
Things that are not obvious in this:
The path in the sharing command can not end in a slash. But the shell WILL add it if you let it finish it.
The stop / start is needed. sharing -l will show the new volume but clients can not mount it.
Another neat trick that I learned today is that you have to slice an Xraid into 2 LUNs in order to overcome an internal 2 Terrabyte limit of the Storenext *cough* Apple Xsan software. That alone gave us an unexpected 2.7TB boost.
Anil Dash gives a couple of bullet points how the reign of the iPod could be ended. 80% of them are valid and will work. Which is better than what happend so far: 5% worked, and that was coincidence.
If Creative, Sony, Phillips and all other still suck in a year from now then they can not say they didn’t know what to do:
Somebody told them.
Macintouch did an extensive laptop durability study
Since my PowerBook6,7 is working mostly fine I think I will not replace it with an early IBook. Easier on the money, it’s not to slow, and hell, if I see the new ones I probably want to have one anyway. This talk is still cheap right now.
If you buy a brand new windows machine then there are ten steps to keep it safe. Well, as brand new as those tips appear to be, even if you do so, you can get your Windows PC infected simply by visiting a website.
one of the many articles disscussing the matter
If you are so unlucky and use a Windows PC then you could have been infected by clicking on that lick. Of course the link above is legit. But do you trust me? How many links do you click on?
I have written this again and again: I use no firewall, I use no virus protection, I am in the internet 16 hours a day and leave my computer on 24/7. I jump on every wifi that I can find if I need to. I visit all sorts of websites. Really everything. My cookie list reads really disgusting, that’s for sure. Various reasons, not really what you think. Point being that I behave extremely ‘dangerous’ and never had a single problem. No spyware, no virus, nothing. My computer runs what I want. No a single bit more. Always have been.
I am not particularly lucky nor smart. It’s just that I don’t run Windows.
It’s one of these things that make you shake your head if you look at it in clear daylight: You can even buy ‘virus protection software’ for OS X. People are so used to think that Computers need some extra protection that they miss the point that the whole switch will get you out of the mess that grew around Microsoft Windows.
The other day somebody told me that it was funny to watch me becoming such a Mac zealot. I think it’s more a passion for the alternative, that is less fucked up. Apple sucks in many ways: I am writing this, with a Microsoft mouse attached to my PowerBook6,7 since the trackpad goes stale till the next reboot. I have open bugs with their ‘pro’ division, and they didn’t come up with a solution. At all. But getting a new computer and having to go through ten steps to make it somewhat secure? Clearly I have an easier life. Imagine you buy a car and then have to go and get brakes and seat belts and a lock for it from somewhere else.
I am surprised that this is news or a rumor. Of course there will be black laptops from Apple. Or any other color that sells. It was never about ‘apple is the computer maker whos cheap laptops are white’. It was about ‘apple cares about design’.
Apple’s design is alright. It does stand out, since all the other computer makers just make crap.
The only other nice laptop that I saw was an IBM one.
I am not sure if Adobe is that important.
But the underlying question that Apple is indeed challenging Microsoft’s operating system monopoly is interesting. And not news to me.
What I had not realised is the vertical integration depth of all those Office applications and macros arouund it. This will most likely not go away. Ever. Vista will have a chance if all those tiny little visual basic thingies continue to work.
Those IT monsters will not go away. They rather turn the internet off of safety and glue the CDROM drives shut before they try to migrate those tangled webs of IT gopher tape to /anything/ that is different.