Looks like the people have made their mind up on the decider. Now would be the perfect time to find Osama Bin Laden. Whatever happened to that project Mr. B? Will taking my shoes when getting on an airplane help with that? Or maybe he surrenders himself if we add another really vivid colored threat level? “Hyper Mauve” or something?
Warners must feel pretty powerful today. Just a couple of weeks after they threw their hat in the ring it’s all over. Once the stalemate was tilting it took surprising little time for everybody to jump on the winning side. I wonder how quickly one can start reading that Blu-Ray was in any way better than HD-DVD. Of course it was not. Both formats were identical. My theory is that now folklore will be created that Blu-Ray was better, and therefor won. Truth is -and shall remain- that Sony “just” did the better maneuvering and somehow got Warners on board in the right moment. Good that this part of media technology history is over. Now comes the real uphill battle: Blu-Ray vs DVD and the fact that people have more choices to entertain themselves than there seems to be Plastics around.
“Plastics. Benjamin, Plastics”
In the past gmail has been good with spam filtering. Just now I checked up on a prospect. It turned out that he felt I was interested in his business, since I did not reply to his emails. They were in the gmail spam folder. Nothing special about them. Sadly you can not search the spam folder. Spammers never made a single cent with me. But they cost me and everybody else money. When I was looking at the last 3,000 spam mails I got (2 days) it seems that they peddle only a few items. I am sure that most of the spam tries to benefit just a couple of business. How about somebody going over there to these people and kind of make then reconsider the business attitude?
The SX 70 was an amazingly nice device. And the Eames’s sure knew how to explain technology. Too bad that Polaroid is really serious about giving up on making those little chemical mircale boxes. I once bought a slide scanner that was crap. Since Samy’s camera only wanted to return it against store credit I had allot of money to burn for Polaroids. And it was allot of fun.
Since a while I have a very early MacBook Pro. Overall I got used to it, love it as much as I did the PowerBook. Funny how you get used to everything. I am sure it still gets how etc etc. Back then I got it with the biggest drive that was possible: 120GB. Of course that one has been above 95% full for the last year or so. Finally I got around to put a 250GB drive in the machine and, surprisingly, it even worked. I did probably not to these things in the smartest way, but in the end it worked:
I got a 250 GB drive from Amazon that let’s you end up with 232 GB formatted capacity in real bytes. The Western Digital WD2500BEVS Scorpio 250 GB 2.5-inch SATA Hard Drive is 129$ right now.
I got a Macally B-S250U USB 2.0 2.5-Inch SATA Hard Drive Enclosure for 25$. Putting the drive into the enclosure was easier than I thought. Funny enough the enclosure needs a 2 USB connections to work. One for data the other one for power. Even more strange is that with just one cable the LED will light up and the drive will click repeatedly. I was convinced that the drive was DOA at that point.
So then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents of my internal drive to the newer bigger one. It took more than a minute to copy all the Adobe Acrobat crap. I really need to delete that. Adobe Acrobat is ‘near-malware’. Anyway. I let the copy finish over night.
There are lots of screws to get into the MacBook Pro. The internet seems to agree ont he fact that the MacBook Pro is much easier to get into than the PowerBook. I found the instructions at iFixit to be very helpful. The Torx T6 screw driver you need for 2 screws in the case and 4 on the drive I found at Sears. 2.49. They sell a set of 3 little screwdrivers for 10 dollars. Or you pay 7 buying them individually.
Gettting the upper part keyboard part off was a bit tricky. A little bit of careful jiggling around did the trick.
I also went ahead and disconnected the power light. It sit’s on top of the harddrive. I don’t need to see a room illuminated by my sleeping laptop while I am trying to sleep as well.
Still amazed that it did work.
Roughly drafted writes about Apple and it’s ProApps. And the future of them. It feels that the author uses just a few to many arguments. I think that not all is well in the Pro Apps world of Apple. Nobody knows. Neither do I. That’s the Apple way, and that is part of the problem: You can not manage the communication around Pro Apps like you do for the next iPod.
Apple announced Aperture 2. I neither used Aperture-1 nor Lighroom. But I talked to people who did. Aperture was (an / another) example for Apples inability to come up with Pro Applications on it’s own. You just can’t in that vacuum that the super tight Apple communication rules dictate. Apple has money and brilliant engineers and the best intentions. But that’s not enough. You have to have an open dialog with your Pro clients. Pushing updates that claim “enhancements and bug fixes” and do not give any more detail is simply unacceptible for Pro Applications.
It really must suck to be Microsoft these days. Their attempt to buy Yahoo for more money that they actually have was a desperate move to begin with. And now they even got rejected. Who know that Yahoo! of all companies had choices. In this whole M$ bid media frenzy everybody seem to have forgotten about the layoff story that Yahoo had coming out. Yahoo is ailing. But they seem to have decided that they rather disolve like AOL or Netscape than to be part of would have been the worst merger in the history of Internet companies. Hitting on the ugly girl, since you think you have a chance is bad enough. Getting rejected leaves you with a little less than nothing. Not that I would know anything about that.
After 04 I thought I would not care about the elections again. But that would actually mean letting Bush win for the third time. Regardless how odd and wrong it was to let that happen twice, it should not repeat again. It probably is always worth trying to make the world a better place. So I officially endorse Obama here. Mrs. Clinton is just this years Kerry. And we all know how well Hermann Munster worked. America can vote for the better president. It has done so in the past. Not particularly this century. But -honestly- the choices were not to great either. Bush, Kerry and Gore. 2 or less sylables in a name are simply not enough.
Microsoft tries to buy Yahoo. For 46 billion dollars. 4 short years ago they would have had that kind of money in cash. And then some. Cursorly googling around it seems that M$ cash reserve has melted down to 29 billion. So they would need to raise money to buy Yahoo. They would get eyeballs and visitors. But then what? The technology running Yahoo is completely free of any Microsoft stuff. Yahoo has been actively supporting things like javascript libraries and other open source related items. Will Microsoft run now Unix servers? They have to, or they will kill Yahoo in the attempt to transfer it to their technology base. Yahoo had years to grow. It’s a start up with 15,000 people. Give or take a thousand that needs to get layed of. Or not.
Microsoft used to be the biggest software company in the world. By numbers as well as in the minds of the people. IBM used to be the biggest computer company. Microsoft can consider itself very lucky if it will do as well as IBM does right in a couple of years. Once Gates had left nothing really worked any longer. People will say that. Maybe Bill wants to pull off a Steve, and come back one day?
Google lost two competitors today: Yahoo and Microsoft will be absent from any innovation for a long time while they try to figure to integrate what they have. Maybe in 2009 they emerge with an ok conglomerate of what they were in 2007. Allot of time to get new things going for Google.