Seriously I remember hearing it back in the 70's. Enough already. Transistors are so small that human hair isn't even a reasonable comparison to make.

I recently recovered my very first data files (on 5 1/4" floppies from my high school days - programs I wrote myself plus software from that time) using an Apple IIe from a thrift store, a serial cable, and ADTPro on my Linux box. Now I can in theory run stuff on an emulator, although I didn't get around to it yet. The IIe is now for sale if anybody wants it (only reason being the impending move... otherwise I'd just keep it). tinyurl.com/2f684um

This is just an attention-whoring headline, nothing more. Yeah so other devices sell more than PCs... doesn't mean people will stop using PCs. I can't imagine doing everything I need to do on such small screens. For the kind of light reading / heavy video watching that passes for web surfing with most people, it's understandable, but not for some kinds of work.

Oh and for those who say "finally, good riddance to MS" well we just have new overlords on the other devices. Thank goodness Android and Meego offer some alternatives to the Apple app lock-in. It's the same story all over again with Apple replacing MS this time around, except that this time the playing field is somewhat less tilted at the beginning.

As long as the TSA is allowed to flaut the 4th amendment like that, our standing as a "free society" has been greatly reduced. There is no way that "fixing" the actual images or safeguarding the privacy of them makes up for making you stand there submissively with your arms up inside a scanner which risks your health. You as a citizen should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around; and that's all there is to it.

I use a personal wiki for stuff I don't mind sharing, and usually plain text files in ~/ideas or ~/notes or ~/journal for stuff I don't want to share (backed up occasionally to another system of course). Very rarely I need to use inkscape or dia or gimp to make an illustration of something, although I plan on doing a bit more of that now that I got a Cintiq (it was cheap at a computer swap meet, couldn't resist). It's far from ideal, but we don't have good enough software for that yet... at least, not software which I consider will have a long enough lifetime to be worth using (MS OneNote doesn't count because I don't run Windows often, and can't control what will happen to OneNote or any data that I might store in it. But the UI is slick.) Also I have been using toodledo on the iphone for really terse notes about random ideas that come up while I'm out and about (when I go hiking and get the endorphins going I come up with the most far-out ideas), and also for shopping lists. Again, not ideal, but at least it syncs to their site... I have been planning to write a better tool for that eventually, so I can control where the data is stored.

It's cool that Apple will help indie startups to do the marketing of their apps. What I'm worried most about is whether they will start to impose their idea of "quality" control as they have for the iPhone app store: nothing off-color, no scripting languages (or outright requirement to use Objective C and Cocoa rather than say Qt and C++), must follow their UI design guidelines, etc. Of course it's going to be difficult for them to rein stuff like that in since MacOS is not a new platform. But I think they really shouldn't try as hard as they have on the iPhone, and it's going to suck even harder if they do try.

An "open" app store is a good idea. But it's too bad (and ironic) it will have taken an event like this to prod developers to try to make it slick and popular and to make everything worth having available there. At least fink and macports have already existed for quite a while now. But a unified store for both closed-source and open-source software, and friendly enough for non-geeks to use, is another step beyond. What we will probably get instead will be several open app stores, all of them incomplete.

I've been thinking it would be nice if any operating system could treat the whole universe of available software as if it was readily available: e.g. you could right-click a document and "open with" an application you don't have yet, transparently. Sometimes it would be fulfilled by installing free software, sometimes by prompting you to buy the app, sometimes by using a free cloud app and sometimes by renting a non-free cloud app (filtered according to your preferences of course). Same deal with spotlight, perhaps (although it could get cluttered, showing more stuff that you don't have than stuff that you do). VMs can enable using non-native apps too, so those could also be made available if there is no other choice.

With most commercial software you end up being on your own in the end, and the end comes sooner than you think. They are greedy after all. I have tried switching to MacOS for some tasks, and now I'm reminded again why I hate proprietary software. One of my latest disappointments there has been GarageSale... a few months after buying it, there's a new version for which I'd have to pay to upgrade. And ebay changes their APIs too much, so I'm afraid pretty soon there will be a change which they will not "support". Being closed-source software it would then become useless. I bought it though because there aren't any good free software alternatives these days, and it saves time when creating auctions compared to using the ebay site... just stuff like drag-and-drop of images, and easy formatting (even though I've got lots of experience writing HTML by hand, it's a boring time-wasting thing to do). Another is Parallels. TWO MONTHS after I bought it, I'm already ineligible for a free upgrade to the next version, in which they supposedly made it much more efficient. So my impression of that company is even worse, but OTOH I do have free alternatives (just not as nicely integrated, I suspect).

Several times I've worked at companies which insist on using expensive software because it has "support", e.g. ClearCase and ClearQuest. Again, they suck in some ways, you can't fix it, and you can get better results with svn or git by just investing a little sweat equity in setting it up and getting use to the workflow. So to me the word "support" is always a weasel word: As soon as someone utters it, watch out... here comes a snow job.

I just saw it in SFO a couple weeks ago. Never knew what it was until now... I always figured it was somebody's cell phone acting as an ad-hoc access point, and maybe it didn't work because the GPRS signal was weak or something. That's really stupidly mislabeled. I can see how they would have wanted to "make networking easier" between Windows machines, but why not label it as that instead of like an advertisement or a honeypot?

That's interesting, thanks for posting, although I wonder if you have the details about LCDs right. I didn't know 3D movie glasses are circularly polarized but had wondered why they don't act like regular polarized material.

I just put on a pair of Real 3D glasses; looking at my LCD seems to change the color balance: if my head is straight it's fairly normal, if I tilt to the right it looks warmer, if I tilt to the left the blue starts to dominate more. It's not an absolute blockout of some colors, just a shift in the proportion of them, which seems to have its max effect if my head is tilted about 45 degrees.

I bet they will do a better job. Most of what they do turns out pretty good. But it's getting a little scary that we depend on Google for so many net infrastructure pieces now. This will be just one more. I can imagine a future in which something goes wrong and the gov't would have to step in because of the risk to society if some of their most critical services were allowed to fail. Or, in which Google is broken up after having monopolized too many industries.

I'd say the "best format" needs journaling absolutely, and preferably also extended attributes which work consistently between the two OS's, hardlinks and symlinks working consistently, long filenames, case sensitive, separate metadata for creation time and modification time, suitability to be used on a USB flash drive as well as a hard disk, and ability to mount it in Windows too. Haven't found any such mythical beast yet. If somebody would just finish the journaling support for Linux HFS+....