French Copyright

OK There is a bloging, pod casting, media furore about what the French were about to / might still do in a months time.
Is it right ? Is it fair ? Is it abut time ? Will Apple pull out ? Will this destroy the iPods monopoly ? et al.

There was an interesting blog at daring fireball which I read this morning which talked about Apples’s place / iPod market density. Whether the piece of equipment is being placed in the wrong consumer domain, it should be seen as a luxury and a delicate one at that. A defence is then mounted about apples pricing structure, it is argued that it is not only competitive pricing, but given the “value” of the product it could be seen as under priced. Apple have a lot to thank Amileo for, he hired Jonathon Ive, his design made the iPod an icon.

This all comes at a time when the US version of the competition commission is investigating the record labels to work out if they have colluded in the setting of the online music prices (centred around the ITMS). Is 79p a track correct, it’s very state controlled isn’t it no real market forces are at work. Record labels will soon be renegotiating their deals with St. Steve, is this why he wants to push other media, so he can turn round can claim music downloads are “so last year” ?

The ITMS is / has been a false moniker for some time, with the launch of the ITMS first full length feature film last week – is the reality distortion field already effecting the other major shareholders over at the Mouse Factory ? Does this mean that eventually music will become merely one form of media that people buy online ? Probably not anytime soon, with the size and quality of online video downloads until stupid fast broadband becomes commonplace this is going to have to be limited to TV episodes, which you can get at good quality to download. The Disney film is small, low resolution and still takes like for ages to dl – not good, Desperate housewives is winning though, it’s only 40 minutes long and will play at full screen not to horrifically. More on cost later.

The French have proposed that music bought on iTunes should be playable on what ever media player you want, is essence. There is a bunch of other bits and bobs about author rights and cracking etc. The main thrust is this iTunes / other player piece. To do this apple would either have to divulge the intricacies of their fair play stuff or remove it to allow a cheese eating surrender monkey to buy online play anywhere.
I don’t own an iPod, I have previously lambasted those who do because of what I see as the shortcomings of the device (Until recently a lack of FM tuner, hard disk spinning, horrible screen, rubbish controls) a position that might soon place me in a separate ethical dilemma that I won’t enter into explaining here.
I own my now 3 year old iBead 256 megs, which serve me well whilst jogging, shopping, washing the cornesmobile™ . The size is starting to be a problem when podcasts I get regularly hit 30-50 meg a piece.

I mainly listen to my own CDs I own a lot of CDs, I once tried to convert them all to mp3 and gave up half way through when I ran out of hard disk space. Nowadays this is less of a problem with hundreds of gigs available as portably disks, I could feasibly carry my music around, if I compressed it enough I could possible get it on an iPod. I will always buy CDs, I like them – the art, the paper, the plastic etc.

As such when I wanna rip my own music from my own CDs and put it on my meagre mp3 player I just do it. Since I moved to apple, I do it from iTunes, my mp3 player registering as a drive on the macs.

I have begun to buy music from the ITMS, it’s certainly not cheaper than HMV, for what you get it’s more expensive, you get music only and maybe the album art. Yes you can print it, but you can’t print a CD inlay or the track listing properly. Here is the crooks of it, you can’t natively take the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe soundtrack I bought on ITMS and stick it on my mp3 player for my morning jog. I could on an iPod. I can’t sync with iTunes my mp3 player to my “Today’s Pods” play list; I have to drag them to the desktop, and then drag them to my drive. It still works though.

The French think this is unfair, I think it’s unfair. However I’m not being forced to buy from ITMS, other than Napster doesn’t run on my mac, I could carry on buying from CDWOW and then ripping it myself. What they are I think forgetting is that by apple having this benevolent dictatorship with St. Steve at it’s helm, this complex music online podcasting, buying, downloading, syncing, listening, sorting, tagging, thing all works seamlessly. The reason some argue that legal online music purchasing and downloading has taken off is because apple made it easy, you buy and iPod plug it in, open iTunes and click purchase or buy or import and boom it’s on your computer PC or mac then it’s on your iPod. Why ? Because they know how to do that because the designed it all in the first place.

Some claim apple will wave au revoir to it’s ITMS.fr. The people who would lose out are the French music buying public. Some claim there is a principal here and no matter how benevolent, dictatorships are bad, I usually agree with this – but this isn’t a war, this isn’t a fight for democracy, we’re not in the Persian gulf. You don’t wanna use ITMS, then don’t. People if they were so annoyed that they couldn’t play their music from the ITMS on their Packard Bell Audio Dream they’d have stopped buying from the ITMS and stopped buying iPods. Neither had happened. I think there are more feature rich, audio file compliant players out there… people obviously don’t want them. If there was a demand for the features, apple would have added them. Apple has choreographed the ITMS and the iPod thus far too well.

If it was left up to separate entities, you’d have a mish mash of standards all the different stakeholders engaging in blatant protectionism, a bunch of music sources, a lack of structure and you’d be on a wing and a prayer every time you click download. We know this is the case because to a greater degree this is what happened by IBM losing control of the initial PC market. Clones all popped up claimed to be just as good and for most things they were until you wanted to do the stuff only the clones could let you do, like upgrade this or add that and you were in a sea of hope and usually drowning in despair. Various bodies and entities tried to collaborate to make a standard standard, it failed. MS tried to vet all drivers for Windows. Couldn’t do it because 1) You click “Install anyway” 2) When you do, it still might work 3) They’d already lost / never really had that control so no one cared. Although by loosing control yes prices tumbled, that was an emerging market – record sales aren’t. I don’t believe the record companies will use this open access to rise competition, prices maybe, but not competition. The record companies have yet to prove themselves in this digital millennium anything other than greedy and selfish .

ITMS is I’ve said expensive for what you get, but there is a uniformity that people crave. You know a single is 79p even from the tail end. An album £7.99. That’s the same price as most record shops, Virgin and HMV excluded. Still I don’t like the fact you don’t get the bits of paper and plastic. It’s not just the music you should look at like this. To buy a season of episodes of on DVD is less expensive than from iTunes, they’ve just started talking about this season pass… so this might level the playing field a bit. Universal is about to / has just launched their film download service, I’ve not tried it – but I hear you get the movie to watch near instantly (given download / streaming time) they still post you the DVD and you can get iPod sized versions to download. Apple has it appears been beaten to the punch on this one. Except of course, apple still already has a lead by having distribution software being used by everyone with an iPod / mac. They can’t go dishing out DVDs yet though.

Finally do I think the proposed action is worth it, you have to ask who will it benefit, MS certainly, creative, real etc damn right it will. I’d love to know where certain French lobbyists have gotten campaign money from ? Apple –heck it could do, ITMS sales might rise a few percent (Like supplying apples that can run windows might just raise the market share a few points too). Is it fair to allow apple to expend money and resources on making a process a success then tell them to let every other Tom Dick and Bill in on the secrets of that competitive advantage. Will the French proposal benefit the listener ? I doubt it. Listeners have an easy ride because apple took a problem and solved it well. They do that a lot.

***Mass media publication of science and technology***

I'm not one to push the blame into the lap of films, television or computer games for people being stupid, playing with matches or thinking the idea to hack their buddies up with a machete, at some point though mass media has to take responsibility for some of people's ideas. I love the TV show, Spooks by the BBC, it's called MI5 in the states. In a recent story they ran a line about computer hackers breaking into various computer systems from the internet and causing havoc. One of the hackers pranks was to alter some traffic lights and set them all the green, cue dramatic camera shot, woman with pram and our hero pushing her out of the way. Watching this I do my "Science being portrayed stupidly on TV shout" (TM). Quite simply this is impossible for reasons I won't insult readers by going into here. To be then told by my fellow viewers,

"Oh yeah it could they wouldn't show it otherwise, people can do all sorts with computers, you can hack into anywhere"

Apparently all you need to type is, "Hack Override" or some other mystic incantation.
Nuclear power always raises heckles, genetic modification of grain, basic kinetics of people flying backwards after being hit by a bullet, the use of a defibrillation machine to restart a heart (drives my medics friends crazy).

The media frenzy regarding the triple vaccine completely ignored the fact that most cases of autism are diagnosed at about the same age the vaccine is administered. Everyone is crying out that some educators want to discuss creationism alongside standard big bang theory, suddenly everyone is horrified that in this non secular (no we're not) country the Church might influence education, despite the fact that the Church stopped civil partnership ceremonies for homosexuals being called marriage, but heavens forbid they suggest that God created the planet.

Technology - AOL recently ran an amazing advertising campaign in the UK, a pair of adverts that in one decried the internet as a pollutant of our world, a portal for sex fiends to abuse our children. In the second elevated the internet to a utopian vision of intellectual freedom a melting pot of ideas, understanding and tolerance. It is the only company I know of to completely trash its product in order to sell it. The first of these adverts tapped into peoples real fears about technology, that the computer (yes the actual computer) can cause you harm, it can poison your thoughts, turn your teenage child into a terrorist, make your son or daughter a slave to sexual deviants in eastern Europe. All these things are the computers fault, (I blame the mice and all that cheese), not the users, not the society that drove the disgruntled disaffected youth underground in the first place; it is the machines fault. More hysteria to follow soon...

Currently the UK is having somewhat of an energy crisis, OK we're not in crisis mode yet (See even I'm at it) but given various wars in the Persian Gulf we're in a worrying situation. Some believe one answer is to renew / restart the Nuclear building program. Yes those
glowing green dangerous radioactive installation that teeter on the edge of meltdown waiting to bore through the ground and leave a steaming hole in the earth poisoning the water for a thousand years.

"We know it can happen look what happened in Russia."

This falsehood is an extreme view but the unease about science, be it nuclear, biological, biotech, mechanical exists. People have an inherent distrust, partly caused by ignorance pig headiness and fuelled by the mass media. I realise that if you made all these programs as realistic as possible or even portrayed the ideal levels of safety the engineers would like to display, it would make for a very boring 60 minute episode of (Insert random science / geek / tech program here) indeed. Even so allowing for some artistic license it can be dangerous to promote these kind of hysterical ideas. Why are the plebs not equipped to defend themselves from this onslaugt of crazy talk ?

This all isn't helped by the lack of solid science grounding in our education system, I'm not decrying the status of science teaching, more is the worrying upsurge in those studying the social sciences. Obviously we need people who study sociology, psychology et al. The problem is if we lose our capacity to perform the hard sciences the truly ground breaking research we in turn lose people to educate the next generation in physics and biology that is how we increase teen pregnancy, because as most 14 years olds know you can't get pregnant the first time. If we don't have people to teach maths it means that kid in Pizza Hut can't work out 10% of my bill in his head. Small end of the wedge, what happens when this all comes full loop ? When we attempt to build our next nuclear reactor in house, since really the only people capable of doing it properly are ex soviet scientists hiding out from the Ukraine Mafia in South Africa is that: someone believing the current party line and making up that last 1% to reach a target of 50% in FE decides to try their hand at Nuclear Physics. This someone ends up getting some power of ten wrong and does in fact cause some form of apocalypse akin to that horrid Jane Fonda movie, frighteningly self full filling isn't it ?

This country is currently offering bucket loads of money to become a maths teacher. It's not working. This country is fantastically devoid of intelligent lucid people wanting to enter the public sector and educate the masses in the hard stuff. Part of the blame must lay within the assessment system itself. Some subjects you can train to pass exams, more and more time of teachers is spent training for exam questions, this isn't the teachers faults, given performance related pay, then measuring performance by exam results and tying funding to said results all adds up to a system devoid of the real aim that is teaching the masses to think.
Engineering, maths and physics are hard, learning by rote a load of precedents isn't. A very intelligent psychology grad. said to me, most of her masters heck most of her degree was common sense. Those that choose to enter the sciences work hard, why would they ever bother do all that and then decide to get paid sod all to try and convince a bunch of kids that this stuff is worth learning so that they in turn can be told by the humanities students that nuclear power is evil and will destroy the planet because they saw it on a science program last night, narrated by Jane fonda.

The answer isn't merely a sound bite about education^3, nor throwing more money indiscriminately into the current secondary education system allowing people to just pursue the "easy options" from 16 because maths is too hard, no what is required is a well rounded whole education system covering a more all encompassing system crossing faculties. In the biggest shake up of the post 16 education system the current administration introduced Curriculum 2000. This changed the value of year one study at advanced level. It mandated that advanced level students taking A-Levels would take 4 half subjects in the first year and in the second year increase 3 of those half AS levels into full A-Levels. The hope as I am aware that it would induce people like myself to take along side my Maths, Physics and Computing A-Levels a fourth mind expanding subject, English, psychology, drama ? What actually happened ? Rather than causing students to emerge like beautiful well formed well rounded butterflies with a wide reaching intellect, my lots (science geeks) just added further maths and the English lang, Psychology sociology kids just added... English lit... that's progress for you. This for some has damaged irreparably the post 16 English education system the death knoll has sounded and some are calling for a bold move to a truly well rounded education system like the IB. the problem is from a government stand point... the IB is hard, very hard - and no one can be seen to fail, can they ? Unfortunately there is not and never will be a one size fits all, we've tried all that before. It is correct that some kids, do hard subjects, some do not so hard subjects, some do academic courses, some do hands on vocational courses - the important thing is to take the time to ensure the right kids do the right course and learn about enough of the right stuff. Maybe then when they watch TV they might have a chance a distinguishing science fact from science fiction.

It'll be a blue ray Christmas without you

At 0723 I heard a business update, it appears Sony in an official statement have pushed back, yet again, the release date of their PS3 games machine to November. This is signiifcant in several ways, firstly another delay, secondly they claim it's because of the blu-ray DVD system, thirdly this deadline is cutting it dman close to the US Holiday seaosn starting with Thanks-Giving, and running in the World Wide Christmas season - if they hit this Microsoft will have had a damn near 12 month lead on Sony. The PS3 is going to have to something very special now to hit the xbox, a 12 month lead a slew of games out and prepared for the xbox and Sony still dallying with their DVD componant. If they then missed that it could hurt even more, shares had already dropped 2% and official announcement came post Market Close in Japan, the shares could slide much further when their market reopens tomorrow. Could this be 'game over' ?

Whistle why the mac book pro works

A Must read for all new or prospective mac book owners...

Great minds think alike, well nearly. This very morning I was sat in work and again my iTunes play list finished and I heard the familiar whine. i hit dash board to start iTunes again and noticed the whine drop off, I am running menu meters, a great app people should try. And noticed that activating dash board had upped the second processor to 18%, interesting. Several days ago I had download the Apple Processor preferences pane, and had occasionally been getting annoyed enough when merely browsing the web or writing some plain text to turn off the second core to stop the noise. So I decided that it was blatantly something to do with load balancing on the two cores. I was planning to blog this myself, and even considered digging out the good ole GCC and trying my hand at some "proper programming" as I call it compared to my normal day of Web Applications development.

I experimented empirically activating various functions like scrolling a PDF or a webpage to make the noise come and go. Just as i was finishing for the day, I gave my active bookmarks a quick glance and noticed one of my favourite sites had a new entry; MacBook Pro I noticed... so I started to read and was amused that these little bugs catch us all out at some time or another and in fact quite selfishly pleased that I wasn't alone.

Whilst I don't know if your 8% is exactly right I completely agree with the theorem and was highly ammused by your trails to reach the magic number !

What was new to me was your observation about the mains connectivity. As soon as I read it I agreed and the sound of a thousand pennies dropping could be heard over the damn whining noise. I had only subconsciously noticed that I heard the sound first thing in the morning at work, before I could be bothered plugging my baby in, and when I first got home from work, also can't be bothered plugging her in right away. I shouted out loud, much to the surprise of my co worker "Yes he's damn well right it is to do with that" A long explanation followed and some smug gloating from my non apple converted colleagues that Apples arn't completely immune to snags.

To be honest the problem isn't bugging me out that much even when it' there I run iTunes a lot and as such either am using enough cycles anyway to keep it happy or am simply drowning out the problem. I will however compile the code supplied, then I can pretend i've done some real programming ;-)

My Quicksilver Tips (QS means Quick Silver)

It's not going to be a full how too of quicksilver, others have written very good ones of those, in fact that's what got me using quicksilver in the first place.

On we go. (Subject -> Action -> Object) my QS Activation command is... ^+Space

Firstly thank god it's universal, I doubt I could have sustained using it under rosetta, it'd hurt physically hurt.
Once it's installed, I activate the beta functions; they claim to be less stable, and yes maybe that's what causes Quicksilver to crash occasionally, but not enough to warrant turning them off.

What advanced features do I then use ? Funky radial menus is something I've had turned on for quite some time, but often forget to use. I love the fact Quicksilver can effectively access any applications menu structure.
If I'm feeling particularly keyboard bound, rather than right clicking, sorry control clicking, an e-mail in my inbox I can QS->mail.app->menu->messages->move->on my mac->destination folder
I can also do this through the apple mail module.

I don't use the iTunes radial menus.

Some time after getting my first mac some 8 months ago, before tasting that cool aid, having it course through my veins, I used to be (what am I saying I still am) a Windows user, I noticed one of the prime things I missed was a shortcut to lock my machine. I know I can activate the screen saver and have that password'd, but that isn't fast enough when someone unsavoury is heading your way just as you're composing a message to their boss about how unsavoury they are, no I don't do that really. But you know you're getting up from the machine and you want boom locked ! Not waiting for the screen saver or that nonsense. Now I thought this MUST be possible on quicksilver but I couldn't find out how. So for all those out there here you are:
This command in terminal effectively activates a fast user switch, taking you back to the login screen whilst leaving all your stuff running.
/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend; exit;
The exit; also closes the window you run it from.
So how did I get this into quick silver ?
In QS preferences ensure you have the "Command Line Tool" checked.
In QS preferences, on the actions section, ensure you have "All Actions" highlighted in Type. Then not far down that list, although it will vary depending on what modules you've played with you will find "Run a text command in shell" Make sure that is checked.
Now in triggers hit the little plus symbol, and you will get like a miniature QS interface, the paste that line above into the Subject; The Action needs to be "Run a text command" hit OK. Now click little symbol of a key, and a new tab pops out, the top box is marked "Hot Key" click in there and now press the keys you want to make Lock / User Switch what ever, I use Command + Shift + W, because it's similar to what I have to use on the bastardised version of windows at work.

I use some iTunes scripts supplied with QS for when I'm forcing the Maltese Telephone Operator to endure my pod-casts if a phone call comes in about how to attach a file or other urgent matters, I will usually out of courtesy pause my music / pods etc. To do this I don't need to go scrabbling around like some animal to find the iTune program, behold my primary QS shortcut, QS->Pause then later QS->Play. Only this evening I was going to hook those up to trigger keys, see before, when I thought why not write a script to detect if iTunes is paused then play and visa versa. I trotted off to the scripts folder and low and behold I found the play Pause script which does exactly that. So all I had to do then was hook that up to a trigger, and boom. Command+Shift+P plays and pauses my music.
Another iTunes QS script I use when listening pod casts I often need to go back a bit and listen again to a web address or a company name, so I altered a supplied rewind script which when installed just activates the rewind function of iTunes. You can e-mail for my version, now my version rewinds 10 seconds, it's obvious when you open it that if you want to rewind longer or short you just change the 10 to your own value. So now with QS->Rewind, I can skip back and hear that address I missed.

Taking my laptop to and from work, I use the apple network location functions quite a lot. I've found the "Network Location Switch" module combined with the "Switch to Location" action hooked up to a trigger, means I can command+alt+control+W for work and command+alt+control+H for home.

The actions you set in triggers, like my command+alt+control+H, or play pause, don't need you to explicitly activate quicksilver merely that it is running.

Another favourite: Mail To Compose and Direct Mail To, both require a couple of modules and actions turned on. E-Mail support plug-in. Apple Address Book plug-in. Under Catalog make sure you've got a tick next to recent mail addresses. Then you can do a couple of cool things.
QS->.Subject->Compose->Person
QS->.Some text you want to send->Direct->Person
The first one, easy, opens up a new message with that subject and to the person specified. The second one, skips a beat, it just sends it straight off boom gone, you'll hear a cheeky woosh and it's all over dude. I regularly request coffees or jsut generally wind up my coleagues with insanely quick e-mailing to the Maltese Office Queen with this direct mail function but remember it's fairly unstoppably quick SO Don't type, QS->.My boss is a fool->direct->myboss@mysoontobeoldjob.com
QS Gets even cleverer here, the Person, can be an address card by name, or the beginning of a recently used address, just watch it the first few times you use it to make sure it's guesstimating correctly.

Dictionary, fairly self explanatory: QS->.word->Dictionary = Definition

iCals, these are recent for me but I use them daily, hourly even ! Plug in required, "iCal Module (+)" Then you can:
QS->.A todo item-> iCal todo and there it is in your iCal todo list.
QS->.A todo item-> iCal event and there it is in your iCal Events list.

I often get concerned that I'm expanding more mental capacity remembering all my stupid shortcuts than i would simply following the process. I don't agree with this as you build these devices into your workflow, indeed until i wrote this i hadn't realised how many I use. I decided I'd try to remove a load of stuff from my dock and commit to QS, it worked, I don't miss the icons, I like the extra space and I can instantiate any program with a quick QS->A program, and it gets it right. It soon learns what you want. I launch, bluetooh, mail, deerpark, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto - you name it. I'm sure I've missed some, when i remember them I'll come back to this post and write them in. I might make this a propper html file with pictures, whataya think ?

Wasting Paper

Given the Inspection Fever sweeping work we've been printing "evidence" so fast the printers must all gather round at night and swap war stories; "Oh man I had this colour job today, right detailed it were" Yes they are all northern printers. I was considering today how much fuller our recycling was at the end of the week compared to the beginning of the week. It isn't right I tell you how much paper just I have gone through this week. It's completely ironic of course, I don't mean that because the vagabonds won't read half of it, or that no one really cares about the paper work because you either know your a good teacher or not. I mean that given that the major advances in computing were dreamed up and created first time by a damn photo copier company.

Thinking that if everyone was gonna move to this computer stuff they'd stop needing photocopiers, remember the dream of the paperless office ? They clearly didn't need to worry. I don't understand it though, I'm as guilty as anyone, it stems from a laziness I think, since using a computer we've become lazy. Not in the utopian way the computers were supposed to gift us but just in the general production and distribution of written work. Before I had a computer writing an essay meant I'd sit down with a pad and make a plan, not a proper one like we were supposed to in school but an attempt. Then you'd write the first draft, sit down read it and draw all over it with arrows, new sentences, different paragraph structure then, you'd write it out again getting a better version but you'd still maybe draw all over it and then finally write out a final version, ok you think that looses a lot of paper but because writing that final version took time you were more conscientious in the production of you work.

For some time after I got my first word processing computer lets say around 95 / 96 ? I still sat down made a plan and then drew on it before typing. Now few people do this, we mostly "compose at the keyboard." Whilst this seems best at first, you can move text change words more simply it should improve quality. Wrong, what for most seniors at uni constitutes writing an essay is sitting down, usually far later than they should have done to start some work and hitting the keys for a number of hours, hitting print and then heading to the faculty office and submission is over with. This is wrong, it's an offence to writing it's an offence to yourself, it does no justice to your ability as an intelligent human being! It's lazy. there is no review process in the work, OK we might glance through it but really we're only looking for wavy green or red lines. This isn't due process. This doesn't create a good piece of work. We tell ourselves editing is easier on screen, which is clearly a lie because otherwise we'd do it. What can be easier than drawing a big fat red arrow from one paragraph to another section of text, edit done !

I think this has happened because people have become precious about their work. They believe they get it write first time. They can't improve on a piece of work they think is complete. It takes to long to do it on paper. You've got 5000 words on screen that's the word limit, so it's finished. Leave it alone. Wrong. Arrogant. Lazy.

I beg of you all let's stop this. We're not that good, we can't compose at the keyboard and get it right first time. I beg myself to consider this next time I write a long piece. Make that plan on paper. Write you thoughts out on paper. It's a quaint idea but hear me out. Then collect your sources, make a flowing argument putting a story board like stack of papers on the counter top, on the floor whatever. Only then touch the keyboard, start with section headings. Drop your quotes or evidence into those sections. Then if you're gonna compose at the keyboard start to fill out your document when you think you've written your stuff print it. This is called your draft.

Now take this archaic paper version and procure another ancient artefact called a pencil. Now read through your "draft" using that pencil to just go wild. Cross bits out. Move bits around. Make notes, like "Make better", "doesn't make sense" or simply "WTF?". Now go back to the computer and make the moving alterations. Write some more, fix the bad bits and delete the downright crap bits. I know it's difficult. I mean, you wrote it. Its your baby. Its work. Lemme tell you it's a draft so lets be honest, some of it is crap.

Iterate through this print, annotate and change loop a few times. You will realise you can't make a perfect document, each time you'll wanna change things - be careful here don't fall into a perfectionism trap, thoroughness = good, perfectionism != good, perfectionism = bad, a waste of time.

I'm going to go into some detail here about this magical word I used further up: delete. There is an entire key on the keyboard for this and you know what's interesting... it's for more than just correcting spellings, this is a powerful tool you can wipe out entire paragraphs with this, a whole page if it's worthless can be exorcised by that magical key.

People don't like this, and this problem extends further than simply writing a document, a paper, a thesis. Coders do this. What's a greater offence is when coders do this in a team. They mentally compartmentalise their sections of code off, they believe that they own the code. "It's my code", no buddy it's not. Especially in a team. The code belongs to the project; if someone wants to see something and think "Hey that's cool but I could do it this way and it might work, better, faster, more elegantly." That is not a problem. It is for the benefit of the project. It's all good baby. We must all learn that nothing we write is sacred. it's not a dead sea scroll, it's not a stone tablet. It can change, it's good to change, let it change.

I began by saying what a lot of paper is wasted by printing, re printing, checking finding an underline missing, re printing, finding a wrong font, re printing, finding a missing picture, re printing. Yet then I said hey lets use some paper and a pen and print then scribble. These ideas are not at odds. What i hate is that we seem to compose at the keyboard and refuse to alter text compared to the idea that we'll print tens of times just to get a font right. It drives me mad. We could actually use this onscreen wysiwyg thing to check the document for those layout problems before we hit that final print, because we always think when we're printing that final version. Why don't we ? You guessed it we're lazy.

Sometimes we're not lazy, sometimes we're rushed... but that's another story, a long bile filled rant about bureaucracy, unpreparedness and more laziness.

So stop being lazy; plan writing properly; print less. I do it for my blogs, I keep a list of ideas I wanna talk about and add thoughts to them over time until I've got enough hopefully intelligent thoughts, well more intelligent than your average plant could come up with, in there to then compose into a piece of writing. Don't know if it works though.

Mag Safe!

Damit; It's caught me out twice, I sit cross legged and the latop sits on my legs, well as your legs move around i've thus far twice knocked out the mag safe connector. So my jury is out on this. I'll have to try and trip over the cable to see it's worth.

M

Mac owning the entire service line

I have wanted to write this for some time since I was forced to wait a stupid amount of time to get my mac book. Sometimes apple's time to market is awesome, St. Steve, announces a product, mac mini for example and people walk across the street and boom they've just bought one. Steve announced the Intel macs back in January; great everyone thought the imacs were out immediately; I can see why they did that since the people that are going to buy the imac aren't gonna be to bothered by the lack of pro apps at that point. How every the mac books started shipping in the states some two weeks ago, yet still took two weeks for them to get across the pond to the UK I don't know, my heart goes out to the like of The Tao of Mac dude who probably still can't get his hands on a mac book.

Apple for a long time have seen the usefulness of owning their own retail stores; 1) It gives them further control 2) Makes them more money 3) A property portfolio always looks good (OK I don't know if they own the land) In fact back in 2003 Fred Anderson said: "I'd much rather have money spent on RD that is going to enable us to come out with an even greater flow of innovative products and on our apple retail stores that enable us to get great control." Look at that about the retail stores.

Quite often with apple their actions can appear to have a historical basis when they've been shafted, the secrecy of their products whilst in itself an end, probably began because when they worked with others -read M$ - years ago when developing their OS, it got plagiarised, now I know all about the history and that apply got the idea from Parc in the first place yada yada yada; non the less Bill saw apple and he saw it was insanely great and thought... I could do with a piece of that.
Apple's treatment of it's employees, whilst receiving mixed reviews, again historically it's all drug smoking hippies, well their coders are... the retail store staff conditions have mixed reports... much like Veal Calves in transit.
Apple now refusal to consider licensing the operating system; previously they lost out, they ended up competing against themselves, this is one place that Microsoft got it right; they didn't care who ran their software as they made no money off hardware.
Given this learned historical context why isn't apple being learned regarding its own success. Many years ago their was a small technological company called Model Instrumentation Telemetry Systems, MITS developed what was to be the first home computer, and by that it was a box with some lights and switches and it computed. Thanks to some fantastic advertising on the front of a small publication "Popular Electronics"; demand exploded. Poor old Ed Roberts, CEO, and his chums couldn't keep up, people sent them lots and lots of money but Ed hadn't planned for the demand and got terribly behind. Now apple isn't a small company with $0.25m working out of a warehouse in New Mexico, they already own a butt load of logistical channels; they have advertising, they have enthusiastic sales people, why then must they insist on making customers wait and wait and wait.

When the mac book was launched everyone knew it'd be out in about a month; he said that, clearly because Intel and co. were planning to sprinkle a bit more magic optimisation dust and indeed they even bumped up all the machines to boot. However the US market was still seeing mac books shipping a clear two weeks before the UK. now whilst I don't believe this is truly acceptable in our post concord days you can still get a consignment of boxes from California / China to x, y and z places for a synchronised world launch, you can still maybe accept that the US gets fed first. What i don't get is why the stores, that Steve owns, runs, pays employees to man didn't get their demo models until last week ?

Until last November I didn't have an apple store across the street from me, I had to go to either Selfridges (ooo) or John Lewis (oo). If they were made to wait that is understandable; it really is, but not apple's own retail stores. What is really most annoying in all this that stupid damn stereo was sat booming on a table in store like 3 days later !

Given apples revelations that they're going to open more stores in the UK, shouldn't they be making sure their current stores have enough links to the supply chain already in place, rather than getting low end mac books, and not knowing when they'd get the better ones... then some arriving like two days later . OK I know this was a new product and some are blaming Intel, and that my store mostly has good stock, unless you want a black iPod the other week, or a new power supply some time before that...

An interesting comment is alleged recently to have come from the mouth of babes, well the Woz; I concede this comment is now in dispute but the Woz allegedly said apple should spin out the iPod bit of the business. Then one particular apple employee I spoke to in store recently was that their jobs would be a heck of a lot easier if the iPod was separate. Something about Intel being the spawn of Satan, I'm sure I've got that bit wrong.
Well I'm done, part history, part rant, part thought.

After my wait how is it going then ? Well given that the apple store rang me today to let me know they had the 2GHz models in is a bit annoying but I'm enjoying it. It's nice having the dual screens complementing each other at work. It still gets a bit confused about sleeping etc. The a battery isn't great. Problem could be I live on wireless and the web. Won't help but I do have the screen turned right down and it's still lovely. I've been on the machine since maybe 1800 and it's now two hours later and it reckons I've got 40 minutes left - two hours 40 mins isn't what I'd hoped for. I was hoping for maybe four, I'd heard tell of five from iBooks ?

I wanted to sing the praises of the migration assistant some more. OK so it only works with firewire target mode during setup, but that is patently because of the amount of data you might be asking it to move. I took my nice and shiny... did I mention the shiny ? 80 gig hard disk and after transfer i had a whopping 13 gig free ? What's that about well according to sizeIt, it's iTunes (11 gig; On my laptop I know, I like having my music with me, it helps keep me and the Maltese yokel stress free)

At work everyone right now has Ofsted Fever, I thought it'd be like boogie fever but it's not as much fun. Listen to the song "Hey Julie" by the Fountains of Wayne, you'll get my point.

I am getting better at avoiding the caps key when i mean the `a` key.
I like the fact that connectors are on both sides meaning you can usually reach some port from your accessory.
The recover time from sleep is awesome, truly awesome, yes it's storing the data in warm RAM and it uses some battery but when it gets to slow it shuts down, maybe instead it should put the image on disk rather than shutting down to nil.
I have been using Word today and I was slating it over speed, until I noticed this other Rosetta application in my activity monitor which is living in my dock recently, Pages '05 is Interpreted, this has annoyed me, if apple could write a universal OS 5 years ago, and port everything else to native through this time, why not old Pages ? Rosetta, while seamless, is memory hungry and with the lower end mac book having only 512 I can feel it. Pages is a big bugger and so is Word, so if you wanna use multiple non natives, consider the extra RAM. Thank God the RAM is user serviceable.

Some people have commented on a Word scrolling problem... still not noticed it. Other have whined about a speaker problem, now i thought I could hear this, but I figured it isn't speaker noise, it sounds like it's coming from the centre, it is processor dependant, I think I can hear it more when the machine is silent and you more the mouse. It's not crazy crazy annoying, but I always have some music on or podcasts anyway. I tried a VLC Intel version last night bless it, it managed a avi but not much else.

While I'm on universal binaries, I was considering the universal logo this AM in the shower, where I do my best thinking. It's Yin and Tang right, left and right, black and white, good and bad. What's the bad supposed to be, Intel ? Was Woz right ? Apple is the good great force bringing balance to the universe... am i over thinking this ?
Applications I've found Universal binaries for that I use;
Firefox (Deerpark)
Audio Hijack (Beta)
Quicksilver
Applications I'm still forcing through rosetta (there are more but I haven't used them yet);
Office (Hurry up)
Pages '05 (apparently)
Dreamweaver (I might jump to eclipse soon or any decent editor that's universal, recommendations?)
Audacity
SizeIt

I am starting to look at bags too. See; http://store.apple.com/Catalog/uk/Images/TH462_screen.jpg thoughts ?

Firstly a review

I've had my shiny, oh so shiny mac book out of the box for appx 24 hours now. I will put some pics up for those who are interested, I shall be brief. I've been told recently I need to be more brief / concise and less wordy.
The Good: (I shall do detail later)
Universal apps blow me away. Frighteningly fast, but i expected that when I was playing with them in store.
Lots of universal apps out there, Cisco has it's VPN client in binary version 4.9, Cheeky firefox build, menu meters
Amazingly bright screen
So shiny
Backlit keyboard - awesome, you can't know this until you've used one
Migration Assistant - insanely great. I know windows has one and it's great for a big ole lump of files but for settings it falls down a lot. And for heavens sake don't ask the MS one to transfer programs. The apple one, just works.
It's shiny
Two fingered scrolling the best thing i've done two fingers in a while
Rosetta - one word; seamless.
MagSafe; unique, simple - seems to work
Shiny
Camera quality is amazing for the size of it... hell it's amazing compared to my full size isight
Dual cores rock, even down to two graphs in activity monitor or menu meters.
Did I mention it's shiny ?
The Bad: (Actual flaws in design decisions/ production)
Battery life is dodge; OK I've not done a calibration yet but the numbers aren't good
For me being a lowly PC convert, the apple harms me; The track pad too wide, my little finger keeps straying onto the edge and confusing it
For me it's true of all apple laptop keyboards, it's as if they're slightly out of phase with my hands, I can't hit the A key first time I always end up hitting caps lock
Front row: Yes it's cool but what is it doing on a laptop. the mac mini needed it but a high end laptop for travelling no point, especially since they took away the s-vid port, you couldn't lay on the bed and watch this insanely bright screen from accross the room... maybe my hotel rooms are just too big !
Boot time... I expected 27 seconds from some reviews... what happened to mine ?
Metal case, I know it's shiny... shiny is cool - but metal on my legs with shorts on is cold... then after 20 mins... it's f***ing hot. Not dangerously... but it's certainly lowing my sperm count for the period of use.


The ugly: (Personal gripes)
For me this weird A key problem i've got.
Battery life expectations could get pretty ugly if it doesn't improve after calibration.
15.4" don't *whistle*; The dude in the store says, yeah it'll fit in a standard 15" case... i think it would be a bit comfy.
When on mains power and lid closed mode; it seems to get confused easily about sleeping and not sleeping.
Raised expectation on safari speed... what is all the fuss about ?
Wish the screen would go back further
I think since apple are embrassing multibuttons the trackpad clicker should be two buttons.

Interesting

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4758636.stm

Quite interesting, I didn't see the original article; if you think about the point they claim to have been making about the security services ? I believe that the security servcies have more technology / inteligence at their disposal than your run of the mill ISP. Even I think more funding, so can MI5 open your torrents, maybe not in the blink of an eye or with such as dipicted in spy films with the infamous command "decrypt soviet signal", I do think they can spot though whether I'm downloading my latest fix of "desperate housewives" compared to "how to make a back pack bomb, the osama guide" !