Get A Mac Web-only Ads

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:59:12 -0500

What’s there to say, other than these ads crack me up. Give Up I stumbled across while reading an iPhone review : from the corner of my eye I noticed PC and Mac ... “What’s this?”, I wondered! In short order I had rigged a video camera and microphone to my G5 to make an off-the-screen recording - crude, but the flavor is all there. I’ve since learned of Snapz Pro X, which I used to capture the A/V starting with Newswire.

I know I’ve missed at least one of these ads, so if you have it and would like to share, I’d love a copy - thanks.

www.lehigh.edu

Best of Daniel Eran Dilger, RDM

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:47:22 -0500

http://www.roughlydrafted.com
Finally, someone with the guts and knowledge to show us the true Microsoft. I’ll add stanzas of my favorite quotes as I see them, and don’t worry, I’ll go back in time and recover other zingers that I recall.
These are my opinions, I just can’t say them as well as Dan can.
2008/02/21 : Lessons from the Death of HD-DVD
"The death of HD-DVD says more about Microsoft and its future than the general media seems to recognize. It’s not a format war, its a culture war between industry players working to advance the state of the art collectively in partnerships, and one company working to own everything while contributing very little. It’s not hard to see why Microsoft’s bruised and abused former partners are working to align themselves with open solutions rather than buy into more pain with technology tied to Microsoft. That’s very bad news for a company that exists solely as a licensee of third rate product ideas.”
2008/02/07 : Why Does Microsoft Really Want Yahoo?
"The power of the Windows monopoly has begun to dissolve, making the company unable to force itself into new markets with a threatening iron fist.
Particularly since 2000, Microsoft’s monopoly position has:
• failed to advance Windows ahead of Apple’s Mac OS X in the consumer market.
• failed to prevent widespread server adoption of Linux among Enterprise users.
• failed to beat or even match the success of the iPod over years of exclusive licensing deals with hardware makers in Media2Go and PlaysForSure.
• failed to successfully establish its various Windows Media strategies against Apple’s Quicktime and iTunes in digital downloads.
• failed to establish Windows Smartphones against the Enterprise adoption of RIM’s Blackberry and the consumer adoption of the iPhone.
• failed to push console sales against Sony and console profitability against Nintendo.
• failed to stop the renewed growth of Firefox in the browser market, and prevent new competition from Safari and Opera, particularly in mobiles.”

2008/01/29 : John Dvorak Finally Gets Something Right on Apple
"If you thought Microsoft was boring between 2000 and 2007, get ready for a real snorefest for 2008 and into 2015. Meanwhile, Apple has done nothing but pick up speed and scope. Dvorak is right in pointing out the obvious, that Apple gets more play from delivering secret products that are ready to buy at their unveiling than Microsoft gets from promising things out into the distant future that it likely can’t deliver.”
2008/01/28 : Pundits Pounce On Apple in a Contest of Epic Idiocy

"I know it’s a lot to ask, but please, wags of the world, stop making me look like a genius for pointing out the absurdity of your looney trolling, ridiculous naysaying, and insistence that up is down. Together we can enjoy a less stupid world, if you want it.
[Paul Thurrott only gets honorable mention this time, but that will change ... Steve]
2008/01/21 : Apple TV Promises to Take 2008
"Delivering movie rentals is just a way into living rooms for the new box; once there, Apple TV will pipe the world to users over the impartial Internet Protocol, without any external filters imposed by big businesses. No cable cartels, no telephone company filtering or NSA spying, no Blockbuster, no FCC, no MPAA, no Microsoft, no Think Tanks in the Public Interest, and no witch hunting fundamentalists hell bent on inflaming perpetual wars.”
2008/01/11 : CES: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"Outside of its guaranteed revenues from the Windows and Office monopolies, Microsoft is a lumbering failure of epic proportions, particularly in consumer electronics, but also in embedded applications, online media sales, and mobile phone software."
2007/12/22 : The New Apple Patent: WGA Evil or iPhone Knievel?
“We can be extremely glad that somebody with the clout and visibility of Apple is taking on Microsoft to restore competition in the industry and support open source and standards-based development over Microsoft’s completely proprietary, standards-hostile, anti-competitive, third rate products dripping with spyware and onerous DRM policing in a way that insults users.”
2007/06/06 : Microsoft Surface: the Fine Clothes of a Naked Empire
“What happens when the core values of an empire are exposed as a fraud? Does it prompt it change? More likely, it results in the generation of more false information to cover up the embarrassing failings.
Such is the case with Microsoft Corp., which has lost its leadership position in the tech world after six years of failed consumer products initiatives and the inability to innovate beyond--or even keep pace with--faster moving rivals, including Apple and Google.”
2007/06/04 : Scratching the Surface of Microsoft's New Table PC
“Never mind that people have been building functional multi-touch tables for years, or that other companies have similarly been selling them commercially. It’s top form for Microsoft to enter an established space, reserve a simple noun for itself as a trademark, and then pretend to own the legacy it tramples upon.”
...
“Microsoft has neither introduced anything revolutionary, nor improved upon existing technologies, nor found a clear and obvious application for multitouch the way Apple has with the iPhone. What it has done is ported the general idea to Windows, desperately associated Surface hype with the Zune (which has non-functional WiFi) and retroactively claimed credit for a wide swath of technologies dating back to 2001. Wow, that’s crap.”
2007/02/22 : Innovation: Apple at Macworld vs Microsoft at CES
“Bill Gates likes to ridicule Apple's efforts to build its own products and highlights how Microsoft works with a variety of partners.
After creating the PlaysForSure partnership however, Microsoft turned around and blamed its partner hardware makers and music stores for being poor competition to the iPod. It then introduced its own music player product that turned on and killed PlaysForSure this last holiday season. Nice!
What a team player Microsoft is. With partners like Microsoft, who need enemies?”
2006/11/11 : Strike 3: Why Zune will Bomb this Winter
“Microsoft’s looming disaster of Zune sales this winter should alarm investors, but it’s continued efforts to promote the anti-consumer tactics of the RIAA and greedy music executives should give potential Zune enthusiasts something to seriously consider:
The Zune isn’t just a iPod rival, it’s part of Microsoft’s efforts to further enslave consumers to a profit engine designed to suit the desires of the music industry, ignore consumers’ fair use rights, and destroy open content.”
2006/10/11 : The Secret Failures of Microsoft
“Considering how many industry giants have partnered with Microsoft in WMA and PlaysForSure--including WalMart, Napster, MTV, WMA hardware makers, and RIAA label members--it would appear that Microsoft is a leader in successful consumer electronics technology. That’s not the case.
All of these partners hooked up with Microsoft simply because they had no idea of what to do on their own. Few even experimented with their own independent technology plans; they simply picked Microsoft because the company seemed like a safe bet at delivering technology. They obviously didn’t do their homework.
The big secret they missed is that Microsoft hasn't ever earned significant profits in the consumer hardware business, nor ha[ve] its executives proven any business acumen in delivering what consumers want in hardware or creative entertainment, excluding, of course, Microsoft's impressive and highly sophisticated keyboard and mouse division.”
...
“WMA and PlaysForSure specifically failed because the separation of stores, players and technology did not add value for consumers; all it did was create confusion. With Zune, Microsoft is abandoning its PlaysForSure music store and hardware partners in order to deliver an integrated product more similar to Apple's iPod.
But the Zune is too little, too late. Microsoft will repeat its WMA failure with Zune, not because it’s wrong to try shipping an integrated product, but because the Zune lacks of any real connection to the Windows monopoly.
Without any way to tie the new product into its existing, competition-free Windows environment, Microsoft is powerless to force its adoption. Microsoft will be exposed to live competition in real market, which the company has only rarely experienced in the last decade.
The company is in trouble because its core competency is in marketing vaporware using FUD: creating a product illusion that fools enough people to repress sales of existing products, paving the way for the introduction of a ‘nothing special’ product which dominates simply because there’s no competition left to challenge it.”

Installing Leopard : Near Perfection

Sun, 23 Dec 2007 22:46:07 -0500

Much of my life has been spent waiting for a computer to restart. No, that’s not a Windows joke, just an acknowledgment that I’ve installed or upgraded lots of systems from lots of vendors over the ages. When it comes to the Install/Upgrade Experience (IUE), I can readily say that Apple has done a phenomenal job with Mac OS X.

Learn how I created ten new Leopard machines - check out their detailed install history, from simple DVD upgrades, to Disk Utility clones, and even a full restore from a Time Machine Backup.

10-LeopardInstalls-small.pdf : 1 MB
10-LeopardInstalls-large.pdf : 21 MB

Update: January 28, 2008

But there’s one more thing: my new Mac Pro, RAID disks, and more Time Machine information.

If you want to skip having to wade though the fluff, here’s my executive summary. What happens if you temporarily pause using one Time Machine backup disk, begin using a second, and then switch back to the first? Does Time Machine “catch up” on those missed days? Well, for a sample of one, I can say ... yes.

It was May 2007 when I hatched my master plan to upgrade my old Quicksilver PowerMac. But by the time I’d saved enough dough, rumors were floating around about an imminent refresh of the product. So I waited, much longer than I though I’d have to, so long in fact that I finally made the decision to buy 1 minute after the 2008 Macworld keynote, even if there wasn’t a new model.

Imagine my surprise when on a Tuesday morning (8 January) the week before the keynote I noticed that the Apple Store was down - that usually means just one thing, new products! And so I placed my order that morning for a dual quad-core Mac Pro, almost 6 years after I ordered the Quicksilver.

Hornet, as I’ve come to call it, arrived 16 January configured with minimal disk and memory, as by now we all know that it’s far more cost effective to install your own. So over the next few days I added another 4 GB of memory and three more hard disks to completely fill the drive bay. My plan called for mirroring the startup volume, and using the remaining two physical disks as the Time machine backup volume.

This was a snap with Disk Utility. I used the first two disks, each 1 TB in size, to make a 1 TB RAID 1 mirror array. This provides for data redundancy but is no substitute for a normal backup plan. I then used the two Mac Pro installer DVDs to rebuild the new Macintosh HD volume, which weighed in at 16 GB total at the completion of the install.

The last two internal disks were each 500 GB, so I used Disk Utility to make a 1 TB “concat” volume, sometimes called a JBOD. This is Hornet’s Time Machine volume.

Now, I wanted to see how Time Machine handled switching between two Time Machine disks, so before using the internal Time Machine volume I first attached a FireWire 800 external disk and named it TM Backup 1. I let Time Machine use this volume until January 20th, as this shows:

[lusol@hornet:/Volumes/TM Backup 1/Backups.backupdb/Hornet] ls -al
total 8
drwxr-xr-x@ 15 root lusol 510 Jan 26 22:26 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 3 root lusol 102 Jan 17 17:48 ..
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 17 02:14 2008-01-17-021445
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 18 00:57 2008-01-18-005658
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 19 01:19 2008-01-19-011414
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 20 00:58 2008-01-20-005723
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 20 01:58 2008-01-20-015741
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 20 02:58 2008-01-20-025811
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 20 03:59 2008-01-20-035848
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 20 04:59 2008-01-20-045854
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 20 06:01 2008-01-20-060028
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 26 21:41 2008-01-26-214126
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 26 22:21 2008-01-26-222151
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root lusol 17 Jan 26 22:21 Latest -> 2008-01-26-222151
hornet:/Volumes/TM Backup 1/Backups.backupdb/Hornet] sudo du -s -h 2008-01-20-060028/
129G 2008-01-20-060028/

So, 129 GB on TMB1 as of 20 January.

Then I stopped using the external FireWire disk and enabled the internal volume, called TM Backup 2. I used it until the 26th, when I switched back to TMB1 - note the last two Time Machine backups above from the 26th - we’ll get back to them shortly. In the time period from the 20th through the 26th I loaded lots of new iTunes media, mostly movies and podcasts, so I expected these later Time Machine backups to be considerably larger than 129 GB.

This directory listing shows the Time Machine backups from the 20th through the 26th on TMB2 after the switch:

[admin@hornet:/Volumes/TM Backup 2/Backups.backupdb/Hornet] ls -al
total 8
drwxr-xr-x@ 36 root lusol 1224 Jan 28 11:21 .
drwxr-xr-x+ 3 root lusol 102 Jan 20 19:14 ..
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 20 20:50 2008-01-20-204941
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 21 00:46 2008-01-21-004618
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 22 00:42 2008-01-22-004055
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 23 00:34 2008-01-23-003411
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 24 00:58 2008-01-24-005831
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 25 00:21 2008-01-25-002118
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 26 00:22 2008-01-26-002204
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 27 00:21 2008-01-27-002132
...
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root lusol 204 Jan 28 11:21 2008-01-28-112137
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root lusol 17 Jan 28 11:21 Latest -> 2008-01-28-112137

Let’s check the backup size from early morning on the 27th:

hornet:/Volumes/TM Backup 2/Backups.backupdb/Hornet] sudo du -s -h 2008-01-27-002132/
150G 2008-01-27-002132/

Ah, now I’m up to 150 GB on TMB2, and increase of 21 GB from TMB1. So what I expected (wanted?) to see when I resumed using TMB1 was an initial backup size of 21 GB, and that’s exactly what happened (sorry, no screen shot, how remiss of me). But here’s the du summary to prove it:

hornet:/Volumes/TM Backup 1/Backups.backupdb/Hornet] sudo du -s -h 2008-01-26-214126/
150G 2008-01-26-214126/

So there you have, for a sample of one, Time Machine picked up where it left off after a 6 day timeout.

Mac OS X Install "intro movies"

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:09:47 -0500

When installing Mac OS X we’re treated to a short but cool introductory movie. I’ve collected the movies from the various Mac OS X distributions here (and am on the lookout for the remainder).

Cheeta, Puma and Jaguar : iPhone Desktop
Panther : iPhone Desktop
Tiger : iPhone Desktop
Leopard : iPhone Desktop

Apple Lehigh Valley Store Opening

Sat, 29 Sep 2007 09:36:44 -0400

Finally, an Apple Store close to me. This is my second grand opening:

http://gallery.mac.com/lusol/100037