Ballmer still doesn't get it

 Posted on October 22, 2009  |  Erik

“Let’s face it, the Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone,” Ballmer said. “That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.” –AP Newswire (tip of the hat to Daring Fireball) Another Ballmer quotation that highlights (yet again) the fact that he just. doesn’t. get it. The internet wasn’t designed for iPhones or PCs. [Read More]

Building a better NAS for use with Macs, part 2 - The current environment

 Posted on October 20, 2009  |  Erik

Building a better NAS for use with Macs, part 2 - The current environment The current setup (snapshot january 2009) consists of: 1 machine running OS X Server (MacBook Pro) booting off an external 500Gb USB drive three disks in a concatenated RAID for holding Time Machine backups (2x750Gb, 1x500Gb) 1 media server, connected to the TV in the living room (Intel Mac Mini) booting off an external 500Gb firewire disk [Read More]

Moving to the MBP 13"

 Posted on September 10, 2009  |  Erik

I just upgraded to the latest model of the 13" MacBook Pro as a replacement for my 2007 15" MacBook Pro. The major push for the move was a really nice computer bag that I fell in love with, but is too small for the 15" screen. We had recently purchased a 13" at the office for someone that decided not to stay on, so I hijacked the machine. The Unibody construction really makes a huge difference in the overall feel of the machine. [Read More]

More on the iPhone keyboard

 Posted on July 7, 2009  |  Erik

I just finished reading John Gruber’s response to Tim Bray’s commentary on the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard. Which has inspired me to haul out my reasoning for why I think that Apple made the right decision (for Apple). First off, keyboards are more of a habit than anything else. I used to be a Palm user and found the handwriting recognition a useful and reasonably effective means of entering information. [Read More]

iPhone 3.0 iPod podcast tidbits

 Posted on June 18, 2009  |  Erik

There are some nice little touches tucked away in the iPod app that I’m really liking. Specifically, a few new features for podcasts and audiobooks. You can boost or slow the speed by tapping on the new speed button on the right. It rotates through 0.5x, 1x and 2x.That’s going to go a long way to helping me get through my backlog of podcasts. There’s just too much interesting content out there to consume in the limited amount of time that I have available. [Read More]

Snow Leopard Beta first impressions

 Posted on June 16, 2009  |  Erik

Very very nice. Here’s a quick list of random observations I did a clean install of the 10A380 beta build on a 16Gb USB key, testing on a 15" MacBook Pro so the overall performance is pretty sucky, but that’s an issue with the key’s performance rather than the actual OS or the machine. **First impressions:**The install process is pretty much unchanged from Leopard as far as I could tell, with some nice little touches like identifying immediately that the key did not use GUID style partitions so I needed to fix that before installing. [Read More]

Snow Leopard Beta: Exchange integration

 Posted on June 16, 2009  |  Erik

A quick summary of the Exchange integration in Snow Leopard since this seems to be a hot topic for lots of people. I can safely say that if you’re a Mac user in an Exchange environment, you can now (finally) get rid of Entourage and replace it with the standard tools of Mail, iCal and Address Book. If you’ve used the iCal and Address Book integration with OS X Server you won’t see anything new here other than the choice of the server. [Read More]

re: Gartner's Magic Hydrant

 Posted on June 11, 2009  |  Erik

Gartner’s magic hydrant It gushes money Gartner’s business model is genius. They gather information from vendors and users – for large fees from both – and then sell that information back to them for even more money. Bliss. They own a toll booth on the user/vendor information highway. And collect $1.3 billion a year from the traffic – over $300,000 per employee. Drool. But the best is the Magic Quadrant, Gartner’s money-spinning qualitative graphic. [Read More]

Economics is all about value

 Posted on June 8, 2009  |  Erik

People have to understand that basic infrastructure is not where you’re going to be able to add value. An excellent Techdirt article (as they almost always are) highlights how the gas companies share a common distribution infrastructure and inject “value” at the end of the chain since the good (gasoline) is a commodity. Are Cellphone Carriers Like Gas Stations? I’ve been trying to make this point for a while now here in France where the carriers insist on using the infrastructure coverage and quality as a selling point. [Read More]

RE: Google fires back at VMware about virtualization for cloud computing

 Posted on April 29, 2009  |  Erik

_Google fires back at VMware about virtualization for cloud computing: " It’s not a secret that Google is not crazy about hardware virtualization. They made it clear in June 2007, when the engineer André Barroso said: ‘I think it will be very sad if we need to use virtualization,’ he said. ‘It is hard to claim we will never use it, but we don’t really use it today.’… (Via virtualization.info.)_ Ummm - at the risk of stating the obvious, this whole discussion is only a result of the current fuzzy state of affairs around what constitutes “cloud computing”. [Read More]