Intel is fed up with Microsoft. Microsoft has no innovation that drives what Intel must have, which is a use for more processing power. And when they did have one with the Xbox, they went elsewhere.

So Intel buys Apple and works with their OEMs to get products out in the market.

Cringely has a radical vision of the Apple/Intel deal involving cheap commodity Macs...

PBS | I, Cringely . June 9, 2005 - Going for Broke

Rattle wrote:
My 1Ghz G4 Powerbook's performance has really taken a dive since installing Tiger. I'm wondering if anyone else is having similar problems...

Yes, I agree. I wish I had not upgraded. They broke Cisco VPN, Tivo Desktop, and lowered performance a lot. Nothing new has been worth it.

I have one gig of ram, yet regularly my system is having to pull applications out of swap in situations where I'm not pushing it hard and never had a problem in the past.

Yup! It has the same feel as my Windows machine.

Dashboard flat out sucks.

I haven't looked at it in weeks. Its a neat toy, but damn is it expensive, and there is no way to shut it off. There is no GUI method for deleting widgets.

Ok, I like Spotlight...

Haven't touched it. Locatedb anyone? Find?

Safari seems to eat more ram with every update. I'm used to unloading it and re-loading it every so often to alleviate its fat, but that has not been necessary recently because it seems to be crashing more. Mail has been crashing regularly as well.

Safari does seem slow. I think it might be the RSS feeds. I should be able to tell it to stop collecting that data. Instead the only way to turn that off is to remove all the feeds from your bookmarks. I just set the article hold time to one day. I haven't, however, experienced any crashes. Neither Mail nor Safari have died if memory serves.

RE: Tiger not all that great...

] Cisco has released its VPN client for Tiger. This initial
] release does not yet support dual processor machines, but
] it will work on everything else with Mac OS X v10.4. Some
] relevant links: InfoWorld blog and Cisco VPN Client for
] Tiger (Requires CCO password access)"

MacSlash | Cisco VPN Client For Tiger

] MacSkinz Limited Artist Series PodSkinz
]
] Designed by accomplished, well known artists with a
] world-wide following. Each PodSkinz is printed in a
] limited series of 100 per design.
] Numbered 1 through 100 on the inside.

When I first hear about these they had not been made available to the public. You can buy them now...

iPod Skinz Artist Series

Finally...

Skype - Download Skype for Mac OS X

] "DVD Jon has just announced that he cracked the
] encryption in the Apple AirportExpress.

Well, no, he didn't, but he did manage to extract the public key from itunes, which you can use to encrypt a stream and send it to this device. Whats entertaining is that every device has the same private key in it. I'd much rather have that. Then I could stream music to any device.

Slashdot | Johansen Cracks Airport Express Encryption

...locks you in deeper. Want to buy a different portable music player next time you buy one? I hope you don't mind throwing away 5 years of songs you bought on iTunes, because they aren't going to work with anything else.

There was some discussion over the weekend about this but I didn't look into it. Now I have. And I'm pretty unhappy about it.

1. The music selection on iTunes sucks. Modern music is hit or miss. They had the new Orb album, but not the 50 first dates soundtrack. Their 80's selection, on the other hand, leaves a very great deal to be desired. My luck with 80's songs has been about 1 in every 5 searches.

2. iTunes locks you into a pay per play model. If you own an ipod you will never be able to engage in a Rhapsody style subscription model. Jobs is almost religiously opposed to that model. This means that you can't really explore iTunes in search of music that they do have that you might like but haven't heard before. The only real opportunity for that is the Celebrity playlists, which I went through in about an hour when I first loaded the thing up. You won't be able to find the song you want, and you won't learn about new songs that you might like.

3. Apple will never allow any other legal music stores to sell songs for their player. Apple wants a cut of every song that gets sold for their player even though they claim to be taking a loss on iTunes overall and making the money back on selling iPods. This is totally irrational. They are loosing money selling songs, and they are reducing the value of their players by not letting anyone else sell songs for them.

4. Apple has significantly reduced the value of your iPod investment. You will never be able to get all of the songs that you want for your iPod legally unless you continue to buy those old fashioned plastic disks. A competitor in the Windows space will put out a player which is capable of playing songs sold on any music service, and people who buy that player will be able to buy the music they want within the business model that they want. Ultimately, the iPod will look pretty lame when compared to it's Windows alternative, because they'll be downloading all the cool new songs which you won't be able to enjoy unless you hoof it out to the last remaining CD store in your town which hangs on by a thread and mostly sells to Mac users and people who need things on vinyl.

5. Apple has invoked the DMCA to prevent interoperability with their technology. Using a bad law in a bad way ought to be a strike against them.

6. Apple has made a very serious strategic error here that will not only undue their present leadership role in this space, but which damages the investments that their customers have made. This is the reason I didn't own a Mac back in the day. This is the Apple that built a closed platform that didn't interoperate very well with anything and couldn't be taken apart and played with. This is the old Apple. They're back. And they suck.

I'm really unhappy about this.

Why iPod owners should be angry at Apple over the Real case.

] Essentially, Mac browsers (including Safari, Mozilla, and
] Firefox) are all designed to launch the Help Viewer
] program when the help: protocol is invoked in a web link.
] Unfortunately, the Help Viewer program, in turn, is able
] to run scripts. What this means is that a malicious user
] can set up a page with an automatic redirect that runs a
] dangerous script. More details for the tech-minded can be
] found on this MacNN thread. And if you want a terrifying
] (but harmless) example of this, go to
] http://bronosky.com/pub/AppleScript.htm. It will launch
] Terminal and run a harmless du command

mamamusings: serious os x 10.3 security problem

Rather funny.. :) All of this is accurate. The "isn't kind of like boxing with your computer" line is perfect. He is, um, just a bit too stressed out though....

Crash Different