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Archive for August, 2008


Sunday, August 31st, 2008

I still remember, nearly 20 years ago, setting up a brand new Macintosh system in my home. Up till then, I did most of my work at the office, but I had seen the future, more or less, and telecommuting was going to be a large part of it, so I had to be prepared.

Now I had used Macs at the office almost from day one, as soon as they become practical solutions for getting real work done. But I was also losing assignments, because I couldn’t complete them after the workday ended.

In any case, not 15 minutes after opening QuarkXPress to edit a document, I got a system error prompt. If you remember the days of System 6, there would even be a Restart button in the dialog, but it would rarely do anything, and that was the case this time. So I forced a restart, and got back to work.

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Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Consider what Steve Jobs said in his widely-quoted employee memo about the failed rollout of MobileMe, that Apple could have waited somewhat longer to make sure things were working properly before transitioning from .Mac.

He clearly had a point, but he really isn’t going far enough. You see, it has been clear to me for the last several years that marketing considerations and not product readiness are playing too much of a role in Apple’s recent release dates.

Certainly that was probably also true with the iPhone 3G and version 2.0 software. You can see that in the 3G-related issues, which were supposedly addressed, at least in part, in the 2.0.2 update. Then again, if what Roughly Drafted Magazine’s Daniel Eran Dilger suggests in a recent article, it may require all or most iPhone 3G users upgrading the firmware before the problems settle down. That is unless there’s another update forthcoming to expand upon the list of bug fixes.

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Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

I was patiently waiting on the phone, trying to make a service appointment with a company, when the receptionist came back on the phone and apologized for the delay. She fretted how her PC was taking forever to load the pages of their scheduling software, but finally managed, with further delays, to get me booked.

The other day, I was listening to a talk show on Sirius satellite radio, when an ad came on, extolling the virtues of a product that was guaranteed to “remove the sludge from your PC” and have it running in peak condition in short order. For a second, I almost thought I was listening a promotional spot about an oil additive for your car.

Of course, the “sludge” that announcer was talking about included corrupted registry files and other ills, such as adware, that conspire to bring even the most powerful Windows PC to its knees.

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Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

Depending on your point of view about a situation, you can either kick someone when they’re down, or support them and give them a reasonable amount of time to recover. Since Apple Inc. is at the top of the world these days, you can bet that any problems they encounter will be amplified. After all, whatever goes up must come down. Yes, that’s another old phrase, and I hope you’re not getting sick of them.

Well, a recent commentary from Farhad Manjoo at Slate’s site shows how you can take a few disparate facts and develop a thoroughly misleading theory that Apple is in serious trouble. The posture Manjoo takes is typical of slash and burn pieces, to be sure, but it’s definitely worth a few comments.

It all begins in paragraph number one, where the writer says, “In its ubiquitous TV ads, Apple claims that its new iPhone is twice as fast as the original version and just half the price. Neither is true.”

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