18 Posts by Damen Peamu
After a night of botched ritual bobcat sacrifices lead to a printer driver failure on his Windows XP machine, famed columnist John C Dvorak vowed to give up on Windows and switch to a Mac or Linux computer until his “damned contract with the devil expires”. But rather than welcoming him with open arms, it appears that both Apple and the Linux community are trying to persuade Dvorak to stay away.
“Macs are no good at… uh… upgrades,” said Ali McConnell, a spokesman for Apple CEO Steve Jobs, “And the keyboards? Have you seen them? No tactile feedback whatsoever. If I weren’t employed by the company, I wouldn’t be using them. I would much prefer to use Ubuntu!”
Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth disagreed strongly in an email sent to PTTBT:
“The fact is, Linux on the desktop is years away. Decades even. And it still looks ugly. Look at Macs, now those are some slick machines. Sexy machines. Did you see how the icons in the new dock have reflections? THAT’S what computers are meant to be. Oh, sorry, I have to go… my network card has suddenly become incompatible with Ubuntu and I have to write a new one from scratch myself. With punch cards.”
Industry insiders say it is no surprise that the leading competitors to Microsoft are trying to dodge the Dvorak bullet. Many cite Dvorak’s extensive history of “betting on the wrong horse”, suggesting that perhaps, on some cosmic level, if the tech columnist starts liking a product, it is doomed to failure.
Indeed, Microsoft seemed to be thinking along the same lines, when asked for comment:
“Oh, we de-authorized Dvorak’s copies of Windows when we saw the news this morning,” said Jim Freebar, VP of public relations for the Redmond giant, “And… uh… it’s impossible to re-authorize him without… um… four vials of blood and… er… the beating heart of a blind Tibetan monk. So tell him good luck from us. Actually, no, don’t do that… don’t want to draw attention.”
For his part, Dvorak was keeping quiet on his plans for a replacement operating system, though sources have pointed to an Ebay user with the hande “JCDvrk” furiously bidding on old Commodore 64 units over the last 12 hours.
A spokesman for Microsoft contacted members of the press this afternoon to set the record straight about the leaked “wishlist” of Windows 7 features and improvements that has been circulating the web since last night. In a tersely-worded email, Jon Lowenstein of Microsoft PR lambasted the blogosphere for not bothering to check facts before running with the story.
“You ignorant toads,” he wrote in an email sent to such organizations as the New York Times and Wired, “The file in question is clearly labelled ‘Windows No-No’s’. To call it a ‘wishlist’ is just sloppy journalism.”
Indeed, sources inside Redmond confirm that the list is indeed known as the “What-ev-er Sheet” at Microsoft HQ, compiled at the executive level to help the average worker understand which features are considered taboo at department meetings.
“I mean really, ‘plain English error messages’? Seriously? That’s worth like an extra $100 right there!” said one employee who declined to be named, “Who’s gonna pay for that? Not our cheap-ass customers! Most of ‘em won’t even spring for Vista Elite Professional, lazy bastards!”
Industry analysts observe that much of the list can be easily correlated to published features from the Macintosh and Linux operating systems, and is evidence that Microsoft still suffers greatly from “Not Invented Here Syndrome”, or the aversion to adopting quality technology or innovative features that originated outside Redmond’s stifling corporate culture. In the words of one senior partner of a technology research think tank: “They’re dumb asses.”
A spokesman for Apple had no comment, but asked us to direct Microsoft to their Leopard features page, just in case.
This week saw the introduction of NBC/Universal’s new video delivery service called “NBC Direct”, a daring foray by the media giant into the world of digital video. While many sites concentrate on user-generated content, device compatibility and more efficient codec compression, NBC has taken the far superior approach by making a player that chooses a tiny market segment and serves it well. Mostly.
“We looked at making something that would play on Macs or Linux, but that’s where the rest of the industry’s going, and we want to be different,” said Greg Yost, VP of Internet Prognostication at NBC/U. “When we launched Heroes, everyone else was doing medical shows. We dared to be different, and it paid off big time. Except for this season. This season sucks. But we had a good year in there, so it’s still a good analogy.”
Rather than supporting the popular iPod line of player, or Apple’s Mac OS operating system, or even Linux, NBC has opted to support only American Windows Vista computers with their service. And, based on early testing, those are just the tip of the restrictions iceberg.
“If you have a video card made between February and May 2007, it works great. But everyone else is out of luck,” said Mark Rogers, a technology analyst for Ludwig/Granger LLP, “Half our office had video cards made in June, so it took a lot of digging to be able to watch The Office. But when we did, man, it was worth seeing that postage stamp.”
Some critics have charged that the tiny 320×240 video resolution and the 10 frames-per-second playback is a deterrent to the service ever taking off. Bloggers have lambasted the venture, saying the video card restriction, 15-minute viewing window restriction, blood-alcohol testing requirement and 9-minute pre-roll video advertisement will turn most people off the whole idea. And NBC doesn’t necessarily disagree.
“Yeah, those features are meant to shut it down,” said Len Rubenstein, NBC’s VP of New Media and project manager for Hulu.com, NBC/U’s video service joint venture with Fox. “When I found out last month that Greg had been making another video service after I’d used that whole bottle of vodka coming up with the name Hulu, I was pissed. So I made them cripple the thing so badly only 25 people in the entire world could use it.”
Rubenstein’s prediction may be generous, however, as industry analysts suggest only 23 people in the world would actually want to try NBC Direct, 21 of which work for NBC.
Apple is famous for hiding easter eggs in their OSes, dating back to the original Macintosh’s hidden credits movie. But a curious teenager in England has managed to uncover a big one in the source files to the iPhone and iPod Touch… the classic Mac game “Dark Castle”, in its entirety, hacked to work with touch screens.
Activating the easter egg takes a bit of work, but if you’re keen to play this classic game, just follow the steps below:
- On your main menu screen, press the Settings button
- Choose Brightness
- Turn OFF Auto-Brightness and set the brightness to the lowest setting.
- Go back to the main menu and press the Music button
- Hit the Playlists option at the bottom of the screen five times.
- Go back to the main menu and view the Calendar.
- Skip to November 28, 2011 and view it by the day. Scroll down all the way to the bottom.
- Rotate the entire iPod in a clockwise motion for seven full rotations. Be careful not to tip it to the side or the gyroscope may not detect the motion, and you’ll have to start from step 1 all over again.
- Now, without leaving that screen, restart your iPhone/iPod by pressing and holding the standby button on the top of the unit until a slider appears that says “slide to power off”. Slide it and wait for the unit to shut down.
- Restart your unit by pressing the standby button again.
- You should now see the Dark Castle icon in your list of applications!
The easter egg is a bit finicky, so don’t be surprised if you have to try this a few times before you get it to show up. Be especially careful with #7… that’s where I had the most trouble. Also, make sure to play the game in landscape mode, as it was originally intended for old-style computers. This tip has been tested in firmware up to 1.1.1, so it may not work under the new 1.1.2.
If you can find any other hidden features in the iPod or iPhone, send them in to us at PTTBT!
Last week, Google announced the new GPhone, their entry into the mobile phone market. While some pundits have worried about the state of their wireless software standard (“Android”), most have overlooked the hardware aspect, and how it impacts the user experience. PTTBT got a pre-release version of the GPhone from our anonymous Taiwanese insider friend, Jimmy Phong, and took it for a spin…
The GPhone is considerably thinner than most modern phones. Coming in at about 5mm thick (1.5 inches), you can actually bend it into a shallow “C” shape if you try hard enough. The only thing preventing it from being the perfect tight-fitting-jeans phone is that its edges are lined with razor-sharp aluminum plating (it looks cool, but hurts like the dickens).
Along the top of the device are the standard phone buttons: on/off, mute, speaker, handsfree, redial, flash, pause, rewind and I’m Feeling Lucky (each button is about half the width of your finger). The entire front of the phone is a gorgeous 1080p HD plasma display, which unfortunately makes the phone come in at about 15 lbs.
The casing is a polished white, with a fold-out full-size keyboard at the back. Unfortunately, the positioning of the keyboard means you can’t see what you’re typing as you write it, but sources indicate this may be part of a larger social-networking scheme Google has planned to combat Facebook.
The GPhone has no hard drive, but instead connects wirelessly to Google’s new interstellar server array orbiting Venus. Despite the distance, the response time was good, and we had no trouble editing a PowerPoint document while driving to the office last week. Receiving emails was somewhat problematic at times, as GMail’s new IMAP server is more skittish than a meth addict cashier at a drug store.
But perhaps the biggest value of the GPhone is that it’s an iPhone killer. Literally. When the GPhone detects Apple hardware within a 5-metre radius, a small high-power laser beam fires out of the IR port to obliterate the competition. At first we thought it just didn’t like Reggie, our Sales Manager here at PTTBT, but when we brought it to Starbucks, the GPhone reduced half the tables to smoking piles of molten MacBook in just under half a minute.
All in all, the GPhone is a welcome addition to the fast-paced mobile landscape. They should be start selling in North American stores near the start of December, possibly under the same development branding we saw: “DARPA: Top Secret”.
