512 Pixels

NY Times:

Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed — the “thud, thud, thud” of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons — and uploaded photos to his personal blog.

Mr. Shanbhag, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he had not heard the term citizen journalism until Thursday, but now he knows that is exactly what he was doing. “I felt I had a responsibility to share my view with the outside world,” Mr. Shanbhag said in an e-mail message on Saturday morning.

Are his updates news? Should they be considered a factual record of what happened? Can major news outlets use his work as a source?

These are the questions journalists are trying to answer around the world right now. With the emergence of “always-on, everywhere” news, reporters need “always-on, everywhere” sources.

I took apart an iBook G4 today. I do that most days, but today I documented it:

Ars Technica:

To lock users out a missing notebook, the users sends a text message to the notebook with a command reading “lockdown now PC” or “PC Shutoff.” The text message sends a command to the notebook via the cellular broadband modem and, even if the notebook is turned off when the command is received, the next time it starts, the system will be locked down.

An interesting use of the widening-use of 3G in notebooks. (Note: If I was a Window guy, I would own a ThinkPad, without a doubt.)

From the NY Daily News:

A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an “out-of-control” mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store’s front doors and trampled him, police said.

The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde.

When the madness ended, 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured.

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.”

Part of me died when I read that. Horrific. All for some stupid deals? God save us.

PCWorld chimes in on the Apple netbook:

While other vendors scramble to keep up with the Joneses, Apple is well-known for creating innovative products that shake up staid categories. The prospect of an inexpensive mobile computer that melds the netbook form factor with technologies and concepts from the iPhone is intriguing. Could it really happen?

The netbook market could certainly use some innovation. Asus, the company that defined the category, seems to be heading the opposite direction. First it introduced the Eee PC 1000, which traded the older models’ Lilliputian chassis for a more traditional laptop form factor – and upped the price tag. Now comes news that the cost of the 1000 line will climb again, as the original 1000 series is due to be phased out in favor of the new 1002 model. Rather than innovating, Asus seems determined to back away from its original concept.

The iPhone Dev Team has made an interesting announcement today:

…the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch. This is a rough first draft of the port, and many drivers are still missing, but it’s enough that a real alternative operating system is running on the iPhone.

This list seems staggering:

What we don’t have (yet!): - Write support for the NAND - Wireless networking - Touchscreen - Sound - Accelerometer - Baseband support

The group is aiming high with this project: rumor has it they want to port Android to the iPhone. Gulp.

TUAW pointed to this site earlier today, which explains how to make an apple pie that looks like a Mac mini. This is amazing:

We’re certainly not the first to put an Apple logo on a pie, but we think this implementation raises the bar a bit. Unlike a regular pie, you need to start with the top piece since you need to use the pan as a cookie cutter before you line it with dough. Roll out your dough for the top, and press springform frame onto it to get the right shape.

Put the dough on a piece of waxed paper for cutting.

Using a lattice across the shape keeps it from deforming too much as it bakes. You can cut out the logo with a hobby knife or a carefully formed cookie cutter. We went alpha-geek on it and put it in the 45 watt carbon-dioxide laser.

Bold is my emphasis. Holy moly.

No matter how many times I read this:

The slipping economy will force Apple to address a glaring omission in its lineup: the lack of a lower-priced laptop, said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc.

“Apple is facing the possibility that as the economic news gets worse, that they’re increasingly pricing themselves out of an important market,” said Gottheil. “Economic conditions are accelerating this.”

Mac sales have yet to slip due to the economic meltdown, but we’ll see how the company does with holiday sales. But even if the company has a rough quarter, Apple doesn’t get “forced” into much.

As a reminder, here’s what Jobs said\* on the topic of an Apple netbook:

“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.”

\\\________

• Note what Gottheil said in that article:

  “I don’t think they would go below $500.”

  I agree.

Ars on their new 24-inch Apple LED Cinema Display:

The real nicety of the display is that Mac OS X knows when you have attached the display to use its integrated devices. That is, when you’ve hooked it all up, it will use the iSight in the display instead of the notebook’s, and it will use the USB audio on the display and disable the output on the notebook. That is, until you plug a set of headphones into the port on the notebook, at which time the display’s speakers will disable and route the audio directly to your ears automatically.

It’s the little things, you know?

AppleInsider:

Reporting back to investors, Needham Co. analyst Charlie Wolf notes that Apple moved from selling just 61,000 Macs to small businesses in the spring to 188,000 in the three months of Apple’s summer quarter ended in September.

The gain boosted Apple’s share of the field from a modest 1.9 percent during the earlier season to a significant 5.6 percent in summer. It was enough to not only give Apple a new level of influence but also to carry the company through a tough period: where Mac shipments to regular home buyers suddenly cooled in growth from 53.6 percent quarter-to-quarter from the spring to just 9.1 percent in the summer, the small business spike represented nearly all of Apple’s Mac growth at about 97 percent of systems leaving warehouses and shelves.

Such a rapid move is odd for Apple, which has often fought to make any headway in a normally Windows-dominated crowd; it’s inexplicable enough that Wolf himself doesn’t have a simplified answer.

“After years when the Mac’s share of this market barely budged, the increase was so abrupt that there are no obvious explanations for it,” he says.

For those of us in the Apple Authorized Service Provider world, this isn’t surprising. We’re seeing a similar thing. More and more businesses are using the Macintosh. I see several reasons for this:

1. More people use Macs at home than ever before. Those people want the same reliability and ease-of-use at work that they enjoy at home. (This doesn’t count the thousands of college students who use Macs that will want them on their desks at their jobs in the next few years.)

2. Macs can play with Windows. The move to Intel lets Macs run Windows. Most customers we have use XP virtual machines for the handful of apps that don’t support OS X. (Surprisingly, not a lot of business people I know use Boot Camp - I think the rebooting gets old fast.) As more developers realize the Mac isn’t going anywhere, I think we’ll see even PC-only apps come to the platform. But as I write this, I can only think of a handful of apps that lots of people depend on that are PC-only. The number is shrinking.

3. Macs can do Exchange. While the next version of OS X promises full Exchange support for Mail, iCal and Address Book, Entourage 2008 gets the job done quite well for most users.

4. The iPhone Halo Effect. The iPod brought consumers to the Mac in the early 00s. The iPhone 3G is bringing them to the Mac in 2008. For example, our office is mostly PC. But even hardcore Windows guys want an iPhone for company business. The iPhone is so dang sexy, it sucks people into the Apple world.

5. Style. Macs look great. Businessmen and women drool over the MacBook Air. It’s weird… like really thin, metal sex.

6. Reliability is the Mac’s middle name. OS X is simply a better OS than XP or Vista, long-term. With viruses and malware basically a non-issue for Mac users, businesses can feel less worried about their computers coming down with something. And since Apple controls the hardware and the software, Macs run better, longer.

CNET:

There are also a variety of subtle enhancements to program operation, including the ability to apply graphic styles additively. A few changes to the panels include a modification of the Appearance panel’s operation–it’s now an attribute editor, allowing you to toggle visibility or adjust parameters like opacity, blend mode, and fill color–and the addition of a basic Separations preview panel for pre-preflighting color. Adobe improved (some might say “fixed”) Isolation mode, where you drill down into objects to selectively edit, to keep from tossing you out if you deleted the only object in the isolation set. Live preview on clipping masks makes working with them a bit easier, and the Smart Guides now have little readouts that display basics like object dimensions.

“Pre-preflighting color” gets me all worked up.

The Obamafy Photo Booth Plugin puts your face on Obama’s poster. Here’s mine.