Posts Tagged OS X
HTML I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Microsoft, Mobile, Operating Systems, Technology on April 25, 2010
Dear HTML,
I love you, but you’re bringing me down.
Yours Truly,
-Tom
I don’t want to read NYTimes.com on my Macbook Pro anymore. I would much rather read the NYTimes Editor’s Choice iPad app. The same goes for the WSJ. iPad apps are generally so far superior to their HTML counterparts it’s hard not to notice. iPad versions of newspapers look like the awesome mockups we were promised thirty years ago, while today’s web versions of newspapers still look a lot like what was actually available thirty years ago (see this awesome KRON news clip from 1981).
Is the solution to bring apps to the desktop? I don’t think so. I propose that the solution is to evolve the tools we use to create the web closer to the tools we use to create apps.
The web’s infrastructure needs to remain as open as possible. Yes, HTML5 will help, but no, it won’t go far enough in making the web as easy to make beautiful (for instance, providing the library of the sorts of standard interface elements that iPhone OS SDK does). I want HTML to make it as easy as the iPhone OS SDK to layout content with incredible production value without resorting to Flash (or any other closed or 3rd party plugin) or forcing every web designer to reinvent the wheel.
HTML can learn a lot from the iPad and the iPhone OS SDK. Will it? I don’t know, but if the web/HTML is to remain competitive and as open as it has historically has been, I think it needs to incorporate some of the lessons from folks like Apple in a way consistent with its core beliefs. If it can, the web might even become more open. Otherwise, consumers will seek to consume content where it is most appealing and producers/publishers will go there as well (and probably earn superior CPMs given the better production value and branding opportunities) and that may not be on the web, but in an app and I think that would be ashamed.
Windows 7 Anytime Upgrade (WAU) Pricing
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Marketing, Microsoft, Operating Systems, Technology on July 31, 2009
Microsoft just announced the pricing scheme for upgrading from various flavors of Windows 7 to other flavors of Windows 7 through the “Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU)” program. For Microsoft customers, this comes as a relief as it should make life much easier in scenarios such as the following:
One day you decide to purchase a new, sweet looking Dell Mini 10 netbook with Windows 7 Starter. A few weeks later you are reading personal email via Gmail (Internet Explorer), on Twitter (TweetDeck) and listening to music (iTunes), when all of a sudden you realize you missed an important business meeting with Katy Perry and Tay Zonday on the topic of how to solve world hunger because Outlook never served you with a “Meeting Reminder” because you already had three applications open. This would obviously force you to smash your teeth in requiring a long hospital stay and painful oral surgery. Following your release from the hospital you may say to yourself “Hey, self. It might be nice to upgrade that piece of crap Windows 7 Starter edition to something that’s actually functional. Why the hell didn’t Dell warn me about this in the first place? I might still have some of my natural teeth if they had done that.” After an hour on hold with Dell, a Dell sales representive finally picks up and tells you to hang up and call Microsoft and inquire about the “Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU)” program.
NOW, aren’t you glad Microsoft established this program? Isn’t it fucking convenient? You’re damned right it’s convenient. You can upgrade ANYTIME. Not just on Tuesdays or alternating Saturdays like with all those other operating system manufacturers. Is Caldera or Tandy forcing you to upgrade your OS on weekdays from 9am-5pm? With Microsoft you can upgrade from Windows 7 Home Basic Starter Premium Small Business (Northeastern US) 2009 Edition to Windows 7 Prosumer Advanced Home Theater CE Touch Tablet at 4:30am on a SUNDAY! Yes, you read that right. On a SUNDAY! Anytime. Daylight savings time, Christmas Eve, Boxing Day, while you’re in the shower–wait, actually–anytime, except anytime you want to upgrade from say Window 7 Starter directly to Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate. That’s just unreasonable and impossible. You’re an asshole. That’s what you are.
It seems extremely straightforward, but just in case you’ve missed anything or are more visually inclined, I’ve gone ahead and provided a chart for my readers.
And please remember that there’s no official way as of yet to go from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Ultimate or from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Professional outside of buying two upgrade packages. Also unknown is how one might move from Windows 7 Professional to Windows 7 Ultimate.
Let’s look at the pricing plan for OS X upgrades now: $29.
Sometimes I wonder if the Product Marketing and Management folks at Microsoft have any say at all in the things they make. (Is that statement too Marxian for you? Scary, eh?) Perhaps there are just so many people and layers of management that even when they know something such as their pricing is an impending train wreck more than six months from launch, they can’t do anything to correct course. So who does makes deicisions like this inane pricing scheme? Most folks would say “Clearly, a committee.” But I know the real answer. There’s actually one man at Microsoft who made the decision. I hear he calls all the shots in Redmond these days. His name is Clippy.
Parting thought–what about the pricing of this upgrade path?
If I post this graphic on that official Windows 7 Blog, do you think they’ll respond?
Apple Cuts ZFS from Snow Leopard?
Posted by tloverro in Apple, Operating Systems, Storage, Technology on June 10, 2009
It’s beginning to look like Apple has cut the promising ZFS file system technology from even basic read/write inclusion from OS X Snow Leopard and OS X Snow Leopard Server. All previous mentions of ZFS have been removed as you can see (or not see more accurately) here, here and here. This is about as explicit as it gets. Apple lists the file systems for OS X Snow Leopard Server and ZFS is not there. (Somebody even already updated the Wikipedia page on ZFS already to reflect this.)
My guts tells me Apple made the decision for two interrelated reasons:
1) They want to keep Snow Leopard clean and MORE stable, not less stable because of new features…and file systems are a lot of work…per the recent WWDC Keynote.
2) ZFS is just not ready for prime time in production environments and Apple’s file system team realized this. ZFS has not itself been finalized and Apple’s going to have to do a lot of customization work to make it fit into OS X cleanly. This probably also means it will NOT be compatible with any other ZFS deployments / versions. So much for ZFS as a panacea.
Furthermore, for ZFS to be really useful for OS X customers, Apple will need to do the work to make it compatible as a boot disk which will require even more work and customization and Apple will also need to hide all of the brutal command line complexity and zpool crap and normal RAID levels that characterize ZFS. Getting ZFS to be easy to use is another ball of wax altogether! I bet that will take Apple 2-3 years minimum. In other words, kids please don’t hold your breath for ZFS.
Wow! Isn't this fun and easy! The dark side of ZFS...
While I think ZFS is extremely promising I get really concerned when I hear talk about it in mythical and impossibly optimistic savior-esque terms. In reality, it’s got a long way to go and most people only have such a positive impression of ZFS because they’ve never worked with it. Once you have, it tempers your enthusiasm about 50%-95%. Then again, HFS+ is pretty much ancient history at this point and could not be any less stable (particularly with external storage–needing to dismount? ahem?), so I think all OS X customers are long overdue for something bright and shiny.
My two Drobos I have running at home keep my data safe and don’t require me to understand the ZFS diagram shown. And when ZFS does replace HFS+ in OS X I am betting Data Robotics will make Drobos 100% ZFS compatible. Until then, I don’t really feel the need to run ZFS just yet. And remember folks, even if you are running ZFS that does not absolve you from needing offsite storage…
