» An uncompromising vision
The Verge’s Tom Warren:
Microsoft is once again planning to alter the way its Start Screen works in Windows 8.1 Update 1. While the software giant originally released Windows 8.1 last year with an option to bypass the “Metro” interface at boot, sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans have revealed to The Verge that the upcoming update for Windows 8.1 will enable this by default.
I joke but I’m sure I’m partly to blame. I did call it my favorite version of Windows ever. How’s it supposed to flourish after that?
» Trailer for ‘Cosmos’
I watched the original as a teenager and I am going to watch the hell out of this reboot with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
» Paper
Interesting move by Facebook — a dedicated news app from Mike Matas’s team so, naturally, it looks great. I assume this is a typo, though:
Paper will be available exclusively on iPhones initially, debuting in Apple’s App Store on February 3rd.
That’s supposed to read “Facebook Home phones” instead of iPhones, right?
» ‘(One of) the biggest destructions of shareholder value in history’
Writing for Technovia, Ian Betteridge speaks my mind.
» China Daily: Lenovo to buy Motorola business
Unclear whether the price is $2 billion (per China Daily) or $3 billion (per TechCrunch).
Reminder: Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion. It’s cool, though, because pundits applaud these big acquisitions.
ADDED: $2.91 billion, straight from the horse’s mouth. As Nilay Patel notes, Google sold the Motorola cable box division for $2 billion so the loss is only about $7 billion. No biggie.
» Food
Episode 4 of Turning This Car Around is about food and how to get kids to eat it.
» ‘Christ, I hate Blackboard’
davenoon at Lawyers, Guns and Money keys an amazing ode to Blackboard, a software package used throughout higher education.
When I die, I want my whiskey-pickled body larded into a cryonic chamber, then buried deep in the earth. A thousand years from now, I want these loping, crookspined human gargoyles to dig me up and reanimate me. I will learn their language; I will amble to the profane horizon of their blood-gorged vernacular; I will force them at spear-point to build me a time machine; then I will murder them all with my bare hands. I will return to all of you then to bear witness, in a rapturous tornado of filth, to my contempt for that unholy system of course mismanagement software.
I used Blackboard years ago when I took some computer science class at the University of Washington, but I don’t remember much about it other than actively trying to avoid it. Still, if you’ve in any kind of large organization with centralized technology planning you know of a package like this, a package only an IT department would wish upon someone. I don’t know why it has to be that way, but that’s a the way it is.
» ‘The Mac is doing just fine’
Mac unit sales via Benedict Evans who says:
The Mac is doing just fine in a horrible market.
Which is funny because Apple helped make the PC market horrible by creating the tablet market. Microsoft, of course, helped make the PC market horrible by creating Windows 8.
According to Peter Oppenheimer on today’s conference call, Macs have now gained global market share for 30 of the past 31 quarters.
» Good quarter, Apple doomed.
A-gain.
All lines except the iPod but including the Mac are up nicely on record revenue. Profit, however, is flat.
My first Mac: the SE
This is not my first Mac, but it’s pretty close.
The first Mac I ever used was a Mac Plus owned by the father of a friend. It didn’t take much time with it to convince me that a Mac would be my first computer. We played Hunt for the Red October and I won the game because I had just read the book and did exactly what Ramius did. It drove my friend who had spent hours on the game berserk.
A year later, my first Mac was the Mac SE, which I bought used for $2,000 when I was going to graduate school in 1990 (no, your mom is old and, by the way, she says you don’t call enough). Unlike the one pictured above that has a hard drive in one of the floppy slots, my first SE had a 30 MB external SCSI hard drive and two floppy drives so you could run System 6 on one and still access your files on the other if the hard drive went down. Yes, the entire operating system fit on a floppy disk. Not only that, Photoshop fit on a floppy drive and it was quite popular to just copy it off the drives on the computers in the school lab to take home. Not that I would ever [cough mumble change subject]…
I stayed up late into the night playing Shufflepuck Cafe, Shadowgate, Oregon Trail, Scarab of Ra and one of my all-time favorites, Strategic Conquest. I also had a 1400 baud modem and got onto bulletin boards and GEnie, GE’s online service. I bought a book by Adam and Tonya Engst to figure out how to get online. I spent endless hours tinkering with After Dark because we took saving our screens seriously in the 1990s.
Occasionally I even wrote a paper on it.
I sold it in 1992 to buy a marked down LC. Color! Since then I’ve purchased a Quadra 610, a Performa 6400, a PowerBook 520c, a Power Mac G4, a blueberry iBook, two titanium PowerBooks, a white iBook, an aluminum PowerBook, an aluminum iMac, a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air. The SE above I picked up off of eBay around 2000 for a dollar so I could replay some of those old games. The keyboard’s missing a couple of keys and the cable only makes a connection when you prop it in at a certain angle, but it works. Not bad for a 25-year-old computer.
I’ve also bought or been given a number of other “vintage” Macs — a Mac Plus a friend found by the side of the road (still boots!), a G3 PowerBook, a lime iMac and the first Intel Mac mini. There are 13 Macs of various eras in my office alone and three more in other parts of the house. I’ve seen enough of those hoarder shows to know that collecting old Macs is part hobby, part sickness. Why do I need a G3 PowerBook that won’t stay on for more than five minutes? I don’t. But perspective on the computer industry is important, too. You can’t appreciate where we are now without knowing where we’ve come from.
At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
So happy anniversary, Macintosh and here’s to many more. I’m still enjoying the ride. Possibly too much.