It’s not all the books that purport to tell you all you need to know about Microsoft Excel or the Missing Manual for the iPod, although I do question the utility of a thousand page tome about an MP3 player. No, the thing that annoys me are those friendly looking yellow and black books that are marketed at Dummies.
Why would I object to a series of books that tries to make a complex subject clear and approachable?
Like the true Mac obsessive that I am, I was “tuning in” for all the news on todays press event.
Judging by the effect that the coverage is having on the UK store (see screen shot) it seems that I’m not the only one!
First impressions: I like the new iMac. I’m not likely to buy one (since a laptop is powerful enough for all my needs), but the glass/aluminium shell looks great, the new CPUs are fast and the price-points (in the US at least) look reasonable. Not so sure about the keyboard, but I guess it’s just a less mobile version of my MacBooks.
I like Joel. Well, I’ve never actually met him, of course. I mean I like his writing. I’ve read much of his website, I subscribe to his RSS feed so that I can see his new pieces as soon as they’re “published” and I’ve bought his other books even though they’re just rehashes of stuff that’s already on the net. That may seem a little crazy, as though I have more money than sense, but some things are much easier to read on paper than on LCD. And his writing is easy, humorous and engaging, making it worth dipping into occasionally.
Am I getting old? Perhaps. I’ve been using email since 1992 when I first went to university so I just find it second nature now. It’s got to the point where I organise my whole life using it and I get quite frustrated when I actually have to call someone to get something done that could more easily be done asynchronously1. But that’s not how many people think according to ZDNet.co.uk.
Microsoft have been getting lots of press recently because of their new Zune music player. One of its major features is its wireless interface that lets you share music; even most of the advertising talks about the social implications1. But let’s have a quick look at that functionality in more detail.
If I decide that I want to expend an hour of battery life in order to see other Zunes in the area, what can I do? Most famously you can transfer songs. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, there are limits. When I receive a song, I can play it three times or hang onto it for three days2 but after that all I get is an electronic post-it note reminding me about it. Clearly a lot of thought and a lot of engineering effort has gone into these limitations.
The sky is falling! EMI have announced that they are to allow distribution of their content without DRM. From next month, you’ll be able to buy albums from iTunes without the digital rights management chains of Apple’s FairPlay and in higher quality (twice the bit-rate). This is clearly good news, and EMIs move can’t help but encourage the other major labels to follow.
I’ve refrained from commenting about Microsoft’s iPod competitor so far as it’s not much of a challenge to mock it when they decide to make one model dung-coloured.
However this article caught my eye:
AppleInsider | Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249
What the headline doesn’t tell you is that they are planning to make a loss on each unit to make that price-point, just like they do on each XBox games console. I can’t think of many other companies that would make a loss of $388 million in one quarter and consider that to be a good strategy worth replicating for another product.
Most people that know me are aware that I tend to favour the Macintosh over Microsoft Windows. One of the problems with maintaining such a position is that people are always saying how much more expensive Apple products are. While I realise that a single example is not likely to change that, maybe people should look at this Windows XP Media Center PC before throwing stones. A snip at ?5,980,000.00.
If anyone wants to buy me a Mac Pro and a 30″ monitor with their change I won’t argue.
It’s nice to see an article about Apple that’s not about the iPod! This time a reasonably sized Japanese company has switched most of it’s 2300 PCs over to Mac’s.
It’s a sensible move if you ask me! Given the ease of use, lack of virus and availability of MS Office I’ve never quite understood why Mac’s are not in wider use. I guess we need more conversions like this to reassure people that it’s not a foolish move.
I came across this article in the dead-tree edition of Computer Weekly: it discusses how to avoid open source licensing pitfalls. It’s an interesting but flawed piece.
What did he get right? I think it’s fair to say that people should assess the risks of installing free software. Free software is still new to a lot of people making the details of these risk somewhat unknown. He’s right to say that many people do not understand what obligations using some of the various free software licences put them under. I work for a very technically-focused company yet even we have had some internal problems with this.