4 posts tagged “tech”

Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference begins tomorrow with Steve Job's keynote. MacRumors has a good overview of what's expected:

Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2006 Rumor Roundup

As always before an Apple event, the Internet is rife with speculation, Apple's future product plans serving as a Rorschach blob (1) for people to project on their own desires and dreams for the future of personal tech.

My submissions to the Dead Wrong In Public game:

No ipods (they always get their own special event)
No iPhone (would probably gets it own event, of a shared event with ipod)
New intel-based X-serves
New intel-based Mac Pros
New content development tools for extending the iTunes/ITMS ecosystem (basically preparing the world for a completely Apple-based end-to-end content creation and distribution system) I anticipate in the next 12-18 months Apple will be opening up the "long tail" of media distribution, allowing people to make and sell music and movies using the ITMS, as a means of telling Hollywood that if they don't plan nice with putting movies on the ITMS, then Apple will simply sidestep them entirely.

As for Leopard, I would realy like to see improvements to the Finder and Spotlight. Spotlight has so much potential, but as currently implemented I find it annoying and often wish for the days when you could just type command-F and search file names very quickly. I also think networking could be improved a lot-it's still much more trouble than it needs to be to transfer files between machines, not to mention keeping two machines in synch. I agree with the latest date speculations which is that Leopard will be officially announced (what's happening at WWDC is only a "preview') at Macworld 2007 and shipped a month or two after that.

Steve Jobs's keynote starts at 10am tomorrow, and will be covered like by MacRumors.com at http://www.macrumorslive.com.

1 - After reading the wikipedia entry, it seems that, like a lot of people, I refer to Rorschach tests incorrectly. I'm using it in the sense of "people look at it and see what they want to see."

In the late 90s I thought a lot about auctions and auction design when I worked at OffRoad Capital, helping such luminaries as Stephen Pelletier, Susan Woodward and Tim Anderson design the OffRoad auction. Never in our wildest dreams, though, did we imagine the demented "pricing" algorithm used by Limbo Auctions. As Michael Arrington puts it in his post on TechCrunch :

The hook is that the winner of the item isn’t the highest bidder. The winner of each auction is the person with the lowest unique bid for that auctioin, meaning no other person bid that exact amount. If lots of people bid $0.01 and you are the only person bidding $0.02, you win.

If you could bid on Limbo's auctions via web browser, they wouldn't have much of a business model. However...

Bids must be placed via text message. I placed a bid on the 42 inch plasma TV and it required a total of four messages - two sent and two received, to finalize it. Based on my pricing plan, that’s $0.22 on my cell phone bill, some of which Limbo will receive in revenue share. Also, the TV is a Limbo premium auction, which means I was charged an additional $0.99 for my bid. That’s a total cost to me of $1.21...

I'm actually not sure if this is even legal. It sounds like a private lottery-basically giving away prizes randomly and charging for entry. It's legal to run a contest in the US as long as you don't chage for admission. That's why contests at places like McDonald's always stipulate that you can get a free game card (or whatever) by sending in a stamped self-addressed envelope.

While cleaning out stuff from the basement here at 123 I found my two dotcom laptops, and decided to see if they still worked at all. Amazingly enough, both do. As you can see from this picture. You can see that on my Powerbook G3 I'm playing Civ II. I set them up side by side with my current Powerbook to show that, over time, Apple did manage to make their laptops a more reasonable shape and size.

Not pictured, unfortunately, is my dual-USB iBook, which I gave to my cousin. He still uses it, though he says it's quite unreliable.

The Powerbook G3 (the one  on the left) was an amazing piece of engineering. I always thought of it as the Cadillac of laptops. I think it's keyboard is the best I've used-much nicer than the one on my current Powerbook. Big screen, nice comfortable hand-rests. Modularly extensible (I have the CD, floppy disk and zip modules.) Of course, it weighed a back-breaking seven pounds, which I don't miss. I lugged that thing back and forth to OffRoad every day for two years.

In attempt to become conversant with all of 6A's products, I decided to try getting MovableType running on my Powebook. Getting MovableType running meant getting perl running. This required me to dust off the perl knowledge in brain that has been mouldering since the end of dotcom, August 1st 2001.

After some mucking around with the httpd.conf file, I hit a roadblock. No matter what I did, I coudln't get a cgi to run-I just kept getting file permission errors. After studying httpd.conf again, I realized that the instructions I had been following were having me execute perl cgis in Users/*/Sites, while Apache on my system is set up (with php) to serve files in Library/WebServer/Documents. I don't know which is better-seems like six of one half dozoen of another, but I didn't feel like possibly breaking what I already had working (my php set-up, which is key for project Trizzle) so I decided to edit httpd.conf to make perl happen in WebServer/Coments. So that's what I did, and it worked like a charm.

MovableType, though, is still not working. It seems that there a bunch of perl modules that either need to be installed or updated in order for it to work. So that's the next step. In general this is a problem with Mac OS X-even though it includes php and perl and other open-source technologies, which is sweet, they tend to lag behind what's current. It would be nice if Apple could keep more current with them, but it's probably not even in their top thousand things they worry about in Cupertino.