Macworld looks at what is in store* for Microsoft Store customers:
The store will have six different entrances: Starter, Basic, Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate. While all six doors will lead into the same store, the Ultimate door requires a fee of US$100 for no apparent reason.
The whole list had me laughing.
*Haha. Puns are awesome. Right?
According to plans still being rolled out, hardware will become a secondary focus of the stores’ marketing efforts, making way for a spotlight on applications and the digital features of Apple products. The front section of the store will promote, “Why You’ll Love a Mac,” catching visitors when they first enter the store. The section will have signage and brochures pointing out the advantages of a Mac over a Windows PC. The next section of the store will focus on the iLife suite of software applications, and will provide information how they can contribute to a Mac user’s digital lifestyle. And in the third section of the reorganized interior, Apple will highlight the iWork software applications.
Under Mac OS 9, users had the option to restore any “Trash”ed files (before the Trash is emptied) back to their original locations with a simple “Put Away” command. For some reason, this capability was lost in the transition to Mac OS X. In the latest Snow Leopard builds, it’s back (as “Put Back”). So any accidental disposals can now easily be restored with a simple click. Again, this only works for files that have been moved to the Trash but not yet “emptied” (deleted).
Ars Technica on a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study:
Overall, Pew observes that Twitter users engage news and technology at roughly the same rates as everyone else, “but the ways in which they use the technology—to communicate, gather and share information—reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction.”
No big surprise here.
Apple has historically allowed a number of technologies to languish as it focuses on the most promising and profitable products to invest its resources in. That’s good news for anyone wondering if the company’s PNS (push notification services) will ever see the light of day, as the company has so much riding on it. Unlike Apple TV, iCal, and other projects that seem to have taken a long time to develop as back burner hobbies due to the lack of any real revenue stream to justify their development, Apple’s PNS is directly related to immediately profitable, high priority projects from the iPhone to MobileMe to iTunes to Snow Leopard Server.
MobileMe users have been receiving a new phishing e-mail that informs them that their annual subscription is set to renew automatically on a certain date, but that “attempts to charge your credit card have failed.” It then offers to let you log in to update your information.
Maybe I’m a jerk, but I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who get suckered into this kind of thing.
The boys and girls on the Adobe “Adobe Installation and Licensing” team have started a blog:
In addition, we want to hear back from the Adobe community about your out of box experience. We’re under no delusion that the world of installers, updaters and licensing is just peachy. Some of you experience problems installing or updating Adobe software, particularly in enterprise environments. Likewise we have a few problems with the licensing technology for some customers. We want to hear about the problems you face and, hopefully, help to solve them. In addition, the information we get from you all through this blog will help us prioritize your needs so that we address the most important issues first, so please do respond in comments to the posts. We’ll do our best to keep up with you.
Every man-hour of a top designer, programmer or designer spent on the Mac is an hour they don’t have to spend on what really matters at Apple. This doesn’t mean that Macs are getting worse, that argument would be difficult to make, but Macs aren’t improving at the rate Mac users have come to expect. Don’t expect that trend to change. While you’re wishing for a new mini or a “true” Mac netbook Apple is working on the tricky question of resource allocation. For Mac fans, the truth is the best allocation of Apple’s resources isn’t the Mac.
Newspapers and magazines traditionally have had three revenue sources: newsstand sales, subscriptions and advertising. The new business model relies only on the last of these. That makes for a wobbly stool even when the one leg is strong. When it weakens — as countless publishers have seen happen as a result of the recession — the stool can’t possibly stand.
[…]
This notion of charging for content is an old idea not simply because newspapers and magazines have been doing it for more than four centuries. It’s also something they used to do at the dawn of the online era, in the early 1990s. Back then there were a passel of online service companies, such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi and AOL. They used to charge users for the minutes people spent online, and it was naturally in their interest to keep the users online for as long as possible. As a result, good content was valued. When I was in charge of TIME’s nascent online-media department back then, every year or so we would play off AOL and CompuServe; one year the bidding for our magazine and bulletin boards reached $1 million.
A friend of mine tweeted about “ Radiology Art” today. Here’s a bit from their “About” section:
Scans are acquired as DICOM images using a GE CT scanner, then processed in Osirix software on a Macintosh iMac computer. Colors are assigned based on the varying densities of materials present throughout the object. Depending on the spread of densities within a particular subject, black or white backgrounds are chosen. Images are further processed in Adobe Photoshop for proper contrast and balance.
Excellent shots over at boston.com, but they are real hard to look at when you realize how many people have died or (at the least) have lost everything they owned.