As you may have heard, Apple released newly designed Macbooks and Macbook Pros this week and they have eliminated all Firewire ports from the Macbook and left a single Firewire 800 port in the Macbook Pro. Every Mac since the advent of Firewire 1394a in 2000 has had at least one Firewire port. Hell, eMacs even came with two Firewire 400 ports.

According to an email that may or may not have come from Steve Jobs, Apple’s explanation for this nickle-and-dime elimination of the Firewire connection is because “all of the HD camcorders released in the last few years use USB 2.0.”

We get that you’re a visionary product guy, Steve. We understand that you can see the future and Firewire is nowhere in it according to you. However, in the real world present day us long time Apple fans have a shitload of Firewire products that need a way to get connected to our computers. We generally don’t toss out all of our existing electronic gizmos like hard drives, video cameras and iPods because Apple has decided it’s no longer appropriate for us to use.

And since the last time Steve had to deal with a technical problem on his computer was when he made Wozniak hack a problem with his Apple DOS boot loader floppy on his Apple II, he doesn’t see the inherent value of the brilliant, lifesaver Target Disk mode. I can tell you as someone who is constantly fixing people’s issues with their computers, it’s the Macbook users who need me to be able to mount their computer’s hard drive and deal with it… not Macbook Pro users. This feature is one that makes Macs better, different and more usable than your run-of-the-mill crap Dell laptop.

And all those folks who’d used and loved the earlier version of iMovie with their standard def video cameras (through Firewire), iMovie fans got the big F U from Apple when they completely dropped the familiar product (which I’m sure took people a long while to get comfortable with as they made awesome home movies of their kids) and replaced it with a completely new product lacking many of the features that made the tool so great.

Well, like it or not, Steve, Apple’s market share is growing and you’re extending your reach into the more common folks who are not as tech-savvy and not dripping with extra cash to replace their complete computer/video hardware portfolio every couple years. These folks go through a significant decision to spend $1,000+ on a Mac. Your decision is arrogant and puzzling, considering how little it would have cost to include a single Firewire port. And don’t you know that USB 2.0 is a crap standard?

Why is that? Here’s why (from Wikipedia):

Although high-speed USB 2.0 nominally runs at a higher signaling rate (480 Mbit/s) than FireWire 400, typical USB PC-hosts rarely exceed sustained transfers of 280 Mbit/s, with 240 Mbit/s being more typical. This is likely due to USB’s reliance on the host-processor to manage low-level USB protocol, whereas FireWire delegates the same tasks to the interface hardware. For example, the FireWire host interface supports memory-mapped devices, which allows high-level protocols to run without loading the host CPU with interrupts and buffer-copy operations.

FireWire 800 is substantially faster than Hi-Speed USB.

Hear that? USB 2.0 uses the processor of your computer to manage the protocol so it’s inherently slower. You can digitize video while you do something else on your computer. Good luck doing that with USB 2.0.

Why aren’t you leading the charge against promoting such a weak alternative? And if you’re really so gung-ho on USB, what steps are you taking to make sure USB supports the kind of cool things Macs should offer, like Target Disk mode.

Now if you take Apple’s logic on this forward, that Apple provides the ports we “should” be using and really need, how come my Macbook Pro doesn’t have the ports that I need? Why are you reducing the number of ports I have on my high-end laptop? Where’s SATA 3.0 port on any new of the new Macs? As a Pro user I have several SATA external drives and this standard is wicked fast, yet I don’t have it. Sure I can drop another $100 on a lunky ExpressCard to add the capability, but that still doesn’t feel right. How about an HDMI-in? An HDMI-out? How about something new and better than all of these that us forward-thinking Apple Pro users “should” be using?

It strikes me that this decision stems from the same type of arrogance that leads Apple to provide updated software for their computers who’s tech notes describe the update as only containing “bug fixes” rather than the actual specific fixes they have done.

Really? I accused another campaign of something it didn’t do?

Only 612 days after Joe Lieberman’s Joe2006.com web site crashed and burned, causing his campaign to claim the vicious bloggers at DailyKos.com and Ned Lamont’s campaign had hacked into poor Joe’s server and broken it, we now learn through a Freedom of Information Act request that the FBI long ago determined that his server simply crashed. It was never hacked. It was never subject to a Denial of Service attack. The server administrators had a mis-configured server on their hands. The Joomla! hacker never defaced the site.

Where’s the apology, Joe? Obviously those in the Lieberman campaign were aware of this finding a long time ago (the FBI email obtained by the AP was sent in October 2006) but details on the outcome of the investigation were never released. Seems like some political hackery was up. This information might have been useful to the voters in November 2006.

“Senator Lieberman’s campaign team accused an awful lot of good people of breaking the law on the eve of the primary, and they did it for political purposes,” Lamont told the AP in a telephone interview. “If he does the right thing, he’ll stand up and say, ‘I was wrong.”

We’ll never know how much this incident influenced the voters of Connecticut when they all got “hepped-up” on Joementum and put this idiot back in the Senate, but it certainly could come back to haunt him if he tries shacking up with McBush for the general election.

Did you really think this looked appetizing?

I received a spam email today from a caterer in Hollywood (that will remain nameless) and it prompted me to offer this advice to caterers and restaurants all over the world: If you’re not a professional food photographer, do not shoot your own photos of your food. What might have quickly gotten my stomach growling with hunger now has it slightly churning with disgust.

And while I’m offering advice, a couple tips on spam:

1. don’t add me to your spam list without my permission.
2. if you do add me without my permission, please don’t include me and all the people on your list in the To: field.
3. edit your photos to be a reasonable size before attaching them to your spam.
4. don’t attach photos to your spam.

Mmmmm. Is it the food or the Craftsman cottage that’s being sold here?

The only thing I could find in the system log was this cryptic error message:

11/13/07 9:25:49 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.samba.smbd[11536]) Stray process with PGID equal to this dead job: PID 11538 PPID 1 smbd

It’s the Finder’s fault. Relaunched Finder using the Force Quit dialog box and voilà, the PC’s and Samba servers have returned.

[UPDATE]
I have solved this issue. On my computer I currently host two IP addresses through my Ethernet adapter. It appears that the Samba client would randomly choose which IP address it would use for nmblookup calls. Once I deactivated the second IP, leaving only my primary IP on the LAN (where the PCs and Samba servers live), the servers appear AND they all appear to work now. It’s still a bug, but not related to the Finder.

If you’re a stickler for detail, that episode never seemed quite right because it wasn’t clear how they’d gotten the Frogger unplugged from the wall and plugged into the extension cord without powering the machine down.

Now with Wiebetech’s new HotPlug you can jack into the power lines or the power strip feeding your favorite video game machine and take it away. Here’s the video of the HotPlug in action:

Note the triangle in the kind column, but the computers are not sorted correctly.

Acting as a proxy soldier for the Music Industry’s third prong of attack on itself, Jeff Zucker, President & CEO of NBC Universal, attacked Apple (and the iPodfather) for destroying the music industry’s pricing model.

Zucker’s statement is painful because it’s so far from reality. The music industry was aware of the changing digital marketplace throughout the 1990’s and launched venture after venture to try and capture a piece of the digital music market. They failed. Again and again they failed. The iTunes Store opened in 2003 after Steve Jobs, likely sick and tired of watching the Music Industry’s bungled attempts to sell music hurt Apple’s iPod business, decided to bring his golden consumer touch to the world of selling music.

When the iTunes Store opened, the music industry had already spent 10 years trying to sell music online. With crappy subscription models, oppressive DRM, limited selection and overpriced music tracks (I’m talking to you, MusicNet, PressPlay and Rhapsody), they’d fail to gain any traction with consumers (not that it was their fault…labels like Universal basically made that impossible with their licensing terms).

Finally, Apple comes along with enough clout to make a deal and a simplified pricing model and the features consumers wanted (the ability to easily play tracks on multiple computers and burn CDs).

Zucker is mad that Apple wouldn’t let them sell downloadable copies of NBC shows for $4.99/episode (something that NBC took pains to deny, but Apple had confirmed). You read that correctly: $4.99/episode. You mean a season of Heroes is worth $115? In digital form? At 640×480 resolution? With no incremental costs to NBC for distribution? Wow. We are still talking about the show that beams for free through the airwaves to every home in America, right?

I can buy the DVD set for $40, but the digital version is $115? And the DVD set includes “several behind-the-scenes featurettes, mini-documentaries, 50 deleted scenes, select episode commentaries, the original pilot (w/ commentary), and a character map?” And I can get the HD DVD for $70. But Zucker wants to charge me $115.

Zucker, you’re nuts. I can’t wait to see Hulu.com. Perhaps they’ll sell episodes of 30 Rock for $30? Oh wait, Hulu content is free with commercials. Huh?

I get that the Industry is bitter at their inability to build a store that could sell their own products, but to blame Apple for the problem is complete crap. If Zucker really believes this, I would seriously question Hulu’s future. Apple didn’t do anything that the industry couldn’t have done (more easily) for themselves long ago.

[UPDATE]
Just how delusional is Zucker? “Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content, and made a lot of money,” complained Zucker. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.” So now he’s retroactively bitter about all that money Sony, Magnavox, RCA made selling TVs. Clearly the flavor of the month at NBC Universal is charging the hardware manufacturers for their content.

And just to be clear, Zucker, Apple made millions of dollars off of MY content: my music, my shows. Items that I own and purchased.

As a very early adopter of Leopard (installed 10 minutes after receiving the DVD via FedEx), I was only a bit worried that somehow the installer had munged the HFS+ partition on my Macbook Pro (the only one on the disk, by the way). Before rebooting, I ran Disk Utility from the installer DVD and it only saw the physical disk, not the volume, so I rebooted back into 10.4.10 and whoa, my “Macintosh HD” hard drive was still there.

I would have thought it was a fluke, but in upgrading my iMac G4 this morning, the same thing happened. No hard drive volume visible in the installer. In this case, my external 250GB firewire drive showed up, but no volumes from my 40GB internal HD.

I rebooted the G4 and let it sit on the “Choose a language…” screen while I wrote this post and when I arrived on the “Select a Destination” panel, the installer had found the proper volume.

My theory is that the installer starts some sort of disk verification (which unmounts the volume), but inexplicably allows me to continue through the install process. What gives? Anyone else seen this issue?

Looks like Mail is finally shaping up into a slick tool.

When you’re running your computer on a network that has an Apple OS X server, this little app automatically pulls up a list of all the Users and Groups in the Open Directory tree. It’s the new front end for shared contacts and resources on the network. Why this wasn’t simply integrated into Address Book is puzzling.

Here’s Apple’s description of its functions (most of which sound suspiciously things that Address Book should be doing):

Users whose computers have Mac OS X v10.5 and are bound to a Mac OS X server can use Directory to view shared information about people, groups, locations, and resources. They can use Directory to share contacts, set up group services, and manage their own contact information in a server’s directory.

Seems like Apple might have had competing product teams working on Directory and Address Book and as usual the business-focused product looks unfinished.

Directory is a basic front-end to Open Directory: of two preferences available in the application one is whether you want to display a person’s name as First Last, Last First or Last, First; and the other is what type of authentication you want to use.

Perhaps Directory will grow up into a beautiful swan of an application and replace the tired Address Book. It does have a nice Kinko’s meets Facebook icon and that’s a good start.