Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Top Stories
Working Miracles With Xserve RAID
Price/performance is an obvious consideration for most outfits. But for the Children's Miracle Network, cost savings can literally be a life saver.
Past Success Gives Apple Roadmap To WWDC 2004
Apple's Vice President of Worldwide Developer Relations, Ron Okamoto, said the company learned a lot from developer feedback from past shows and the interest generated from announcements at last year's event.
News
Apple Releases AirPort Software 3.4.1
After numerous compliants about signal strength and dropped connections following the AirPort Software 3.4 update, Apple on Monday updated the software again, bringing it to version 3.4.1.
Apple CEO Jobs To Hold iTunes Conference Call
Apple put out the word on Monday that this Wednesday, Steve Jobs will hold a conference call to discuss the first anniversary of the iTunes Music Store and to update the media on what's happening.
Remarkable Success Of Apple's iPod Has Created A Hot Market For Trendy Add-Ons
Apple Of Jobs' Eye: Digital Lifestyle Gadgets
iPod's success shows company may win the game, not by taking on PC rivals directly, but via more digital products.
Strong iPod Market Not Helping Mac G5 Sales
Apple's strategy of getting iPod buyers to also buy Apple desktop computers doesn't seem to be working, according to an industry research report.
Apple Executives Sell $100M Worth Of Shares
Pogue, Hubbard To Be ADHOC Speakers
Five Hours To Kill?
The Holding Pattern screensaver turns your monitor into an airplane window.
DragThing Gets Enhanced Contextual Menus, More
Opinion
Apple And Real — A Few Thoughts
As Apple continually tells us, iTunes is only there to break even. The real goal is to sell more iPods. If that logic is true, then letting Real sell tunes for the iPod should be a good idea.
Editor's Notes : Does iPod need iTunes? It is true that iTunes is a loss-leader in order to sell iPods. But Apple does need iTunes not because so that iPod users can buy tunes, but because iPod users can buy tunes in a high-quality and consistent manner. How can Real add value? My opinion is that it can't without adding inconsistencies. For example, by varying the DRM terms, or by allowing non-labels to sell music. But Steve Jobs do not want to sacrifies quality and consistency unless he's forced to. And he's not being forced to today. (Well, except for the bit about hell being frozed over.)
Lessons Learned
To wrap up my week of upgrading my mother's iMac, I thought I'd mention a few things I'll keep in mind when I next set up a Macintosh for a less-than-computer-savvy user.
Firmer Dollar Bites Apple
Australian Mac fans have been grumbling for months, with some reason, about the high local prices vis-a-vis the US.
Review
How It Sounds Is All In Your Head
Choosing a favorite pair of in-ear canal phones for my yuppy iPod mini is no easy task.
Behind The iTunes Music Store: A Technical Description Of iTMS And FairPlay
This document explains how the iTunes Music Store works. This information is useful to computer science researchers, cryptographers, and politicians, who may be curious to understand the largest deployed DRM system to date.
Wintel
More Attack Code Surfaces For Recent Microsoft Security Holes
Just days after Microsoft warned its customers about the release of code that can exploit a hole in its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) library, new code that claims to exploit another recently disclosed hole surfaced on a French language Web site.