OMG, OS X soon available for non-Apple hardware!!!!
June 06, 2008 at 06:15 AM
Or not.
Okay, so there really should be question marks, not exclamation points, at the end of that headline, but if you're trying to start a Mac rumor, you just can't go with question marks. It's all about projecting the confidence. ;-)
John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes that Apple had dropped the "Mac" from the name of their operating system. Evidence is this photo of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference 2008 hall, all geared up for next week's conference. It pretty clearly shows banners that say only "OS X Leopard" and "OS X iPhone" -- no "Mac" branding to be found anywhere.
That's a contrast to the last two WWDCs where all the branding was "Mac OS X Leopard." You can bet that Apple's marketing team doesn't make big glaring mistakes like "Oops, we left out a major part of the brand from all the conference signage," so it's a safe bet this is a new branding strategy. The question is why?
The easy and most expedient answer is given by the other banner in the photo, the one for OS X iPhone. Now that OS X is the underpinning for the desktop OS and the mobile OS, calling it Mac OS X is a bit bizarre since, well, the iPhone isn't a Mac.
However, they could just as easily have left "Mac OS X" as "Mac OS X" and called the iPhone flavor "iPhone OS X" or (better, IMHO) "Mobile OS X." No real pressing need to drop the Mac from the OS X brand.
The other factoid contributing to my rumor-mongering is the rumor that broke two days ago that Apple will announce OS X 10.6 (code named "Snow Leopard") at WWDC and that OS X 10.6 will be the first Intel-only release of OS X, i.e. the first version that does not support the now-legacy PowerPC processors.
Dropping the Mac-specific branding from OS X plus announcing the first Intel-only version OS X -- seems like things are nicely set up to allow for licensing of OS X to third-party hardware vendors.
OMG, OS X soon available for non-Apple hardware!!!! Extra bonus exclamation points: !!!!!
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Garfield-free Garfield
June 03, 2008 at 05:50 AM
Simply brilliant: photoshop the main character out of one of the most insipid and un-funny comic strips and you get Garfield Minus Garfield, a delightfully existential exploration of the mind of a mildly insane man. I'm torn between thinking that it reveals a depth to Garfield's characterization that I hadn't previously given the strip credit for and thinking that making the strip better by removing the main character reveals just how crappy Garfield really is.
Now the New York Times has gotten hip to Garfield Minus Garfield
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
50 Best Commercial Parodies
May 12, 2008 at 07:22 AM
Blogging this primarily so I don't forget it: the 50 Best Commercial Parodies. Gems from SNL, In Living Color, MadTV, Chapelle's Show, etc.
Not sure I agree with the rankings; they appear to skew toward 1970's era SNL, although I was LOL pleased to re-discover #3, "Robot Insurance."
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Best Game Ever
April 11, 2008 at 06:07 AM
Improv Everywhere pulls public stunts that usually have a tinge of the bizarre. They're probably best known for their annual -- yes, annual -- No Pants Day where, at a pre-determined time on a pre-determined date, thousands of people worldwide drop their trousers in major subway systems and ride the trains in full pants-free glory. Frequently, their pranks poke fun at corporate targets, e.g. getting 80 people to dress up like Best Buy employees and loiter around a specific Best Buy answering questions and being friendly or having 100+ shirtless men pose in an Abercrombie & Fitch store that had a shirtless male model as a greeter.
But the Best Game Ever prank is by far the best prank ever. Not only does it create a public spectacle, but it brings joy to a bunch of kids by turning a random, everyday little league game into a major league event covered by NBC Sports, complete with Jumbotron, Goodyear blimp, and chest-painted fans.
[via Kottke]
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Shover Robot in 2008!
April 03, 2008 at 07:23 AM
If you don't get the reference, it's from this, which as we learn here is derived from this. Thus ends this week's lesson in old school Internet memes.
PAK CHOOIE UNF!
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable licenses
April 02, 2008 at 07:41 PM
With disappointing repetitiveness, I stumble across some bozo up in arms over some company that's attempting to "steal your copyright." These are usually in a lather because they've actually read the Terms of Service for [insert web-based application here] and noticed language that looks something like this:
"the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license."
A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I've had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I'm responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.
Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn't take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it's called the Internet.
Continue reading "Royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable licenses"
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
10,000 Alternate Joe DiMaggios can't be wrong
March 31, 2008 at 05:50 AM
This New York Times article, "A Journey to Baseball's Alternate Universe," is the kind of thing that almost makes me wish I enjoyed math. Almost.
In a fit of scientific skepticism, we decided to calculate how unlikely Joltin’ Joe’s [56-game hitting streak] really was. Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer. In essence, we programmed the computer to construct an enormous set of parallel baseball universes, all with the same players but subject to the vagaries of chance in each one.
Although it doesn't quite set free my inner mathematician, it does bring out the writer in me, that little inner voice that says "What if . . .?"
What if one of those 10,000 alternate Joe DiMaggios -- one who was less successful in baseball and didn't marry Marilyn Monroe -- slipped through the dimensional interface into the universe where Joe DiMaggio is the baseball legend that he is in ours? Or vice versa?
Crap. Now I'm gonna have to go read a DiMaggio biography.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Seriously, RIM, have you no shame?
March 31, 2008 at 05:46 AM
Does the shape, coloring, and body design of RIM's new Blackberry 9000 look vaguely similar to any other product to you guys, too?
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Multicultural Breakfast
February 23, 2008 at 01:12 PM
Clearly I haven't been grocery shopping in a while, because this morning I had to whip together a breakfast from whatever was handy. I wound up making tofu seasoned with red curry powder and scrambled with onions, red peppers, jalapenos and fried kielbasa.
I know. It sounds terrible. But it actually turned out to be a big plate of spicy deliciousness.
As I sat down to eat, I wondered if I could have found a way to represent at least one more culture's cuisine in the same plate. I almost went back for the bottle of sriracha hot sauce to throw a little Thai into the mix . . . but in the end thought better of it. :-)
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Everything Old is New Again
February 06, 2008 at 06:47 AM
Yeah, so I spent a couple hours wrangling around with Movable Type last night. I don't know why. I'd had a lousy day of wrangling with other various bits of software, projects, and people at the office, plus I skipped lunch, so i don't know what made me think that coming home and before eating dinner deciding to entirely redesign a site I hadn't touched in two years.
Glutton. For. Punishment.
It could have gone horrifically wrong. I could have gotten in way over my head, what with the HTML and the CSS and the templates and the MT settings and the repeated clicking of the rebuild button. I could have totally lost it and left the job halfway done, and you could be reading this in 12-point Times Roman on a gray background just like 1996. And it did look dicey there for about 30 minutes when I couldn't figure out why every time I rebuilt the site Movable Type insisted on not rebuilding all the archives. (Answer: set some more radio button preferences and a drop-down or two plus checking the Movable Type documentation. I hate it when I have to RTFM.)
In the end, though, I pulled it off and ordered pad thai to celebrate. The site looks . . . well, it looks like about 2003 instead of 1996. Literally. Those of you who somehow still have me in your feed reader since the days back when I was posting regularly may recognize the same green color scheme and the banner image from a previous design. Stick with what I know how to do.
A couple of years ago, I attempted a much more ambitious site re-design that did go horrifically wrong, and I wound up just slapping up some goofy black-and-orange Movable Type template that I pulled off a free template site. And there it stayed for years, sorta like the stack of boxes sitting next to my desk that I put there when I moved into my condo several years ago. (There's probably something really important and life-changing in those boxes, but it's been so long I no longer have any clue what's in there. It's like a personal time capsule. One day I'll get around to opening them up, and then it'll be all like "Ohhhh, that's where i left that coffee can full of diamonds!")
There's still some hinky stuff. One bit of hinkiness being that if you've subbed to my RSS feed, you probably got a full feed of old posts from me when you woke up this morning. Sorry 'bout that. And I'm not gonna be winning any design awards. I expect I'll want to screw around with colors and line spacing and font sizes . . . or maybe just not touch it for another two years. And, oh yeah, I haven't even looked at it in Internet Explorer yet, so it may look like ass in IE. But, really, if you're using IE, just frickin' switch to Firefox or Safari already. I'm so over you IE users and your quirks.
Anyway. There you have it: Ten Reasons Why slightly updated for the tail end of the decade, but still kicking it with the old school charm. :-)
Now all I have to do is write.
