Plans2Reality

How Apple beat IBM in Steve Jobs' first retail war • The Register

You really want to read this article, and not just because it is pro-Apple. There are two excellent marketing points in it, and an example of why the even biggest company needs to be flexible enough to get something out the door in 48 hours - over a weekend.

The Golden Age of Computer Sales surely must have been Christmas 1984. The Macintosh had just been released, Compaq and IBM offered powerful new CPUs, but the real action was a massive Christmas sales battle between the Apple//c and the IBM PCjr. I remember it well, I was working at ComputerLand in Los Angeles, and I was at the very center of the battle.

via www.theregister.co.uk

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

Excellent book; highly, highly recommended.

Although I do worry that CEOs will read it and decide that they need to be arrogant micromanagers, then they'll be as successful as Steve Jobs was. Sorry guys, it doesn't work that way.

Moving Time Machine backups to another disk

So my Time Machine disk got full, and I wanted to move the files to a large storage array I have, and start fresh.

It's not easy. I finally found these instructions:

    Temporarily turn off Time Machine.

    Plug in the drive and delete two hidden files at its root with the Terminal commands:

    cd /Volumes/MyOldBackupDisk
    sudo rm .com.apple.timemachine.supported
    sudo rm .(some random hex number)

That last rm refers to a file that will get created by TM. Your number will vary, but is seems there will be exactly one file whose filename is a dot followed by a hex number. That's the one you want.

A better strategy might be to note the names of the files, and then rename them and move them alogn with the rest of the files.

Software Update....

...to an old classic:

 

Open-Source Airways

Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport.  They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.


Mac Airlines

All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same.  Everything just.... works. Meals & drinks can be ordered from the iFood online store, but are only digestible on that airplane.

Windows XP Air

The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off.  After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows Vista Air

Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Linux Air

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline.  They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves.  They charge a small fee tocover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself.  When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html.

 

Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful.  You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do *what* with the seat?"

New 10 inch MacBook Air

I had a chance to play with the new 10 inch MacBook Air. My, it's lovely. Between the iPad, the 10 inch MacBook air, and the 13 inch MBA, I think Apple has covered the product range pretty well.

Even my better half, a dedicated Windoze person, was impressed.

Perhaps Santa will bring one. Please, Santa? It's more useful than a pony...

DITA - XML and more for tech pubs

If you create text-oriented content, especially on a large scale, this may be of interest to you:

http://www.intelligentcontent2011.com/

 

No, not Dita vonTeese. Though puttiing her name in this post may increase my page hits.  ;-)

MacBook Pro, 15-inch, i7

Things have been quiet here in gadgetland of late, but we now have a new toy^H^H^tool - a MacBook Pro. We waited for Apple to update the Pro line, then ordered a fifteen-inch with the i7 processor, and maybe more importantly, 8 GB of RAM.

Short answer: it's lovely, and it screams, even at CPU-intensive apps such as InDesign, Photoshop, etc. Hardware-wise, it's thin and light, and seems to be more rugged than the older aluminum series. One does have to carry video-out adapters for VGA or DVI, but that's not a major problem.

We are _so_ happy.

Time Machine Backup; the Sequel

Back in November, I wrote about my experiences using Time Machine. I'm still a huge fan, but I wanted to expand on the experience and some related topics.

Time Machine works really, really, well. It is so intuitive that it is almost too intuitive. However, it has limits:

- it eventually wipes really old stuff. Once the disk is full, it tosses old stuff to make room for new. (You can of course just start with a new disk. Not a bad idea; disks are cheap enough.)

- you need to be a bit careful not to have it back up huge files, such as movies, etc, unless you really need them backed up locally.

- you should still sign up with Backblaze, for off-site backup. Five bucks a month and unlimited backup. THIS is the place to put your movies, etc.

- use SuperDuper to make an occasional image backup. If, as happened to me, you get some weird system corruption, a full-image backup is really nice to have.

Time Machine Saves the Day

Short version: It works.

It works really, really well.

Long version: IT folks will tell you that the mark of a great backup tool isn't backing up, it's restoring. Saturday morning, the (newish) hard drive in my MacBook Pro begain misbehaving. Ordinary repairs didn't seem to help; it becaome more and more erratic - refused to boot, booted wrong, lots of weirdnesses.

Well, I'd been meaning to upgrade to Snow Leopard, so I hooked up a spare drive and installed Snow Leopard on it, then made sure I had the last 24 hours worth of mail (not captured by Time Machine) copied onto it. I transferred a couple of other files that I had worked on since the last Time Machine back, at 1:15 pm Friday.

Then I did a low-level format, and installed Snow Leopard. The install failed, three times. OK, the internal drive is truly junk. I renamed the external drive to the name I had used for the internal drive, then I used Time Machine to restore every. Voila! All is well. No files lost.

So, a big thumbs up to Time Machine!

Fix your Mac at iResQ (iPhones and Pods, too)

I had a sick Mac Mini - it would not boot. I sent it to iResQ and they fixed it and had it back, all in less than a week, and less than Apple was going to charge.

iResQ sends you a shipping container. You put your computer in and send it back. They examine, call you, and you approve the repair. It's dead-bang simple, really.

So, five stars, two thumbs up, etc to iResQ!

They also fix iPhones and iPods, though I have not used that service.