I recently made some bold predictions about the general direction of IT in 2006, in this I said Apple would have a resurgence as a popular operating system developer. Early indications certainly show that this could be the case.
Myer is an Australian department store, which is in my view somewhat conservative and isn’t likely to advertise a product it doesn’t expect that people will want to buy it. It has been years (late 1990’s) since I have seen a non-Windows computer in a Myer or Grace Bros store (Grace Bros was at that stage a partner store of Myer as part of the Coles Myer corporation, the two stores have since merged), so you can imagine my surprise when I looked through a Myer catalogue today and saw three Apple computers running Mac OS X, as well as a bunch of software for Mac. For the record the other five computers for sale were all running Windows.
The Apple computers were an iMac, and iBook and a Powerbook. The software was Apple iLife 2005, Apple iWork 2005, Norton AntiVirus for Mac 2005 and Apple Mac OS X (Tiger) 10.4.3, interestingly this was the full version of OS X and retails for $199, which is pretty good considering that Windows XP Home Edition full version costs $324, and Professional costs $478.
I still think that Apple will anounce an x86 version of Mac OS X later in the year, which would give them an interesting advantage over Windows in that Mac would run natively on x86, the new apple-intel platform (whatever it’s called) as well as Power PC (assuming they continue to support PowerPC for a while), whereas Windows would only run on x86 and 64 bit platforms, and would require a fair bit of end user modification to run on apple-intel (I’m running with that name until somebody corrects me!), something which is probably prohibited under the End User Licence Agreement anyway.
Samuel
January 19th, 2006 at 11:53pm
I wasn’t going to write anything about the blog awards and voting being open etc, especially with two websites actively campaigning on my behalf (something which I don’t endorse), but after checking what was being said in recent links to this blog, I felt compelled to share a gem of wisdom from The Teejmahal with you:
It blows my mind that there are people who actually actively CAMPAIGN for this s***? (*cough*Kitta*cough* *cough*). The hell? They mean nothing. Seriously. People read who they want to read. Insider awards don’t change that, and they never will. Vote for who you like, and if you win – hey, that’s lovely. If you don’t – hey, that’s lovely too. If you’re hung up on results like this, you’re writing for the wrong reasons. Blogger, heal thyself.
…
My advice. Use the awards for their primary purpose – to discover new blogs. There are some great new babies appearing on the scene, and fresh blood can only help the community. The photoblogs in particular are taking off, and there’s some great things happening.
TJ also had, what appears to be, a compliment for me.
The kid’s smart, a HELL of a lot more eloquent than the majority of the OMIGAWD WTF’ers in his age group, and it’ll probably be a bit of an ego boost for him. So all power to him. He’s funny looking, wears skivvies and will quite likely die a virgin, but he knows his own mind and handles ripping with dignity.
Thankfully it will only be another week and the torture of this whole blog awards process will be over. In future years I must remember to decline my nomination.
That being said, I’m not going to try and prevent you voting for me, but I think there are plenty of others who would gain much more satisfaction from winning these awards.
Samuel
January 19th, 2006 at 01:10pm
Samuel’s Persiflage episode number two, the January 2006 edition is online.
The first thing you should notice is that I’ve done away with the previous cringe inducing intro, in favour of something much more useful, in fact Samuel’s Persiflage now has a regular piece of theme music, which certainly helps make the show sound much more professional. During the show you may notice some voiceovers as well, a very big thankyou to ausvoice.com who have done a fantastic job with those.
The main content of this episode of Samuel’s Persiflage is a somewhat comprehensive interview with Wayne Mac, radio historian and author extraordinaire who, as previously noted, has released a book titled “Don’t Touch That Dial, Hits ‘n’ Memories of Australian Radio”. Wayne and I have a good chinwag about Australian radio past and present (mostly past) as well as the book.
We suspend the interview half way through for the listener feedback (podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com), due to time constraints I had to select a few and leave others out, those that were left out should have received personal replies anyway. The listener feedback segment starts with an intro which I spent about an hour on, which I think works quite well…keep an ear out!
We return to the interview, there is plenty of discussion to be had. Nattie can be heard joining the conversation at one stage, just prior to the playing of a John Kerr jingle from 1963, after which we discuss the book and wrap up the interview.
Unfortunately there was no time for any odd or quirky stories, but that doesn’t matter, the interview is great fun.
The file itself is available here, and is 63:00 in length (57.6MB) at 128kbps stereo. (I’ve decided that I can’t stand most of the music used in the podcast being converted to mono, it just sounds very flat. If there is significant demand, I may provide a lower quality dial-up version.)
For those of you who are using podcast software to receive your podcasts, the feed can be found here and if you are using iTunes you can subscribe to Samuel’s Persiflage by clicking here.
Since the last episode, Samuel’s Persiflage has been added to a few podcast directories, so a special welcome to those of you who have come in from a podcast directory.
Podcast related questions and comments can be sent to podcast@samuelgordonstewart.com or left in the comments section of this post.
Samuel
January 19th, 2006 at 04:24am