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Archive for July, 2007

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Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

In a February blog, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was all over the music industry for demanding that iTunes incorporate a digital rights management scheme in order to allow Apple to sell their product. Jobs said he would dispense with it, if he could. But some thought it was just posturing ahead of contract negotiations for new pricing on singles and albums.

As we all know, EMI took Jobs and crew up on the offer, so, at least for that company’s music, there’s a two-tier pricing system for singles, with the stuff free of copying restrictions selling for $1.29 per song, and no change for album pricing. Upgrades are 30 cents per song.

It’s also nice to have the songs encoded at 256K instead of 128K, and some people do seem to enjoy the improvements in audio fidelity, although it may be subtle on some of the junk that passes for hit recordings these days. However, the higher bandwidth does wonders for acoustic music, they tell me.

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Monday, July 30th, 2007

It’s hard to believe that the first iMac appeared nearly nine years ago, that famous Bondi blue pear-shaped personal computer that proved to one and all that Apple was here to stay. In fact, I had a prototype model, although it soon had to be returned to Apple after a firmware update killed it.

After going through several generations with different color schemes and speedier processors, the iMac was reinvented as a lamp base with a display that was fitted onto an elaborate articulated arm.

Well, maybe that was too radical a form factor, because sales reportedly didn’t quite match those of the original. Regardless, the most recent iteration of the iMac is probably what it might have been in the fast place if the innards could have been miniaturized sufficiently. In other words, a slim display with the computer built-in. Indeed, the most recent incarnation is somewhat thinner than the original, and no doubt the size of the components will be reduced even further over time.

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Sunday, July 29th, 2007

The other day, I got involved in a lengthy debate over finding an easier way to install message board software. Now this may not seem to be a big deal to you, except when you realize that any site you visit that includes a discussion forum is using some kind of software to generate those features. It may be something home built or a third-party application, but that’s how it is.

Now for The Paracast discussion forums, we use vBulletin, published by Jelsoft, a British company recently acquired by Internet Brands, Inc. It’s commercial, meaning you pay for a user license and ongoing support. There are lots of other forum applications out there that are actually open source, which means they are free, such as MyBB, which we use on some of our other less-trafficked sites.

Alas, vBulletin suffers from some of the same deficiencies as its open source-based brethren, because the installation process is a throwback to the 1980s. Instead of just double-clicking an installer, you first have to manually place all of vBulletin’s files in a folder on your Web server. Then you must run an installer or upgrade script to set everything up.

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Thursday, July 26th, 2007

It’s nice to see Mac sales consistently besting 1.5 million units every quarter nowadays, and there’s talk that the magic two million figure may be reached as early as the current quarter. This sounds like a lot, and it is as far as Macs are concerned. But sales of a couple of million computers are dwarfed by the likes of Dell and HP, which traditionally record sales in the tens of millions.

On the other hand, the Mac OS is apt to appear in lots of unexpected places, and, before long, Apple’s operating system market share may actually be higher on products other than its personal computers. Of course, some of those products might, in a sense, be personal computers too, but I’ll avoid that labeling for now at least. That may change over time.

First there’s Apple TV, which is basically a slimmed down Mac with a slimmed down operating system designed to funnel your multimedia stuff from Mac or PC to TV. Of course, the iPhone also uses what Apple calls “OS X” to avoid the Mac link, although the guts are derived from the same parent.

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