Craig's Musings

Yesterday was an epic event for anyone who has lived through the personal computer revolution - Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did a joint live interview with Walt Mossberg and Kate Swisher at D. There is no full video archive (ironically, the subtitle of the conference is "All things Digital" - all things but the full interview! (updated 6/1 - they did later post it in 8 segments), but I found the first 15 minutes and an edited down summary. Engadget had a nice play-by-play and I liked the Seattle Times piece. The full transcript was published by the D folks.

Watching the video and reading the transcripts inspired me to out myself - so here we go, here are the top ten things from Apple I love:

#10) I loved my Powermac G4 (RIP). I bought it in 2000 when my first son was born to do video editing.

#9 ) I love my Mac Cube - in all its hugeness compared the Mini. Over the years, I have upgraded it with OS X, 1.25 GB of RAM and 125 GB of hard disk (I tried a 250GB drive in it about 2 1/2 months ago right before I moved but something went horribly, horribly wrong). I will never get rid of it, ever.

#8) I love my Mac Mini. Even though I bought a PPC one right before Apple announced Intel based solutions. Like my Cube, it is with me to stay. I may even buy an Intel based one (before they go away) and put Vista Media Center on it.

#7) I love my iMacs (all 3!) Beautiful. Elegant. Why can't PC makers take a page from Apple's book - design MATTERS.

#6) I love OS X on my iMacs. It is very pretty. I wish more of the software I use ran there.

#5) I love that my iMacs dual boot between OS X and Windows. That's why we now have 3 in the Eisler house - I can have my cake and eat it, too.

#4) I love my 80gb video iPod. Its battery life for watching shows on cross country flights kicks ass. It got me through a lot of DC/Seattle commutes back when I was at AOL.

#3) I love the Mac/PC ads. I know I shouldn't. They hit us where it hurts. But they make me laugh. Every time.

#2) I love, LOVE My AppleTVs. All 5. Plus one at my office. All but the one in my office manually upgraded to 160gb - just in time for Apple to announce a 160gb SKU. DOH!

#1) I love, LOVE, LOVE iTunes + iPod + AppleTV. I buy a season's pass through iTunes and then it is magic - my new shows show up on my PC, my iPod, my AppleTVs. What's on my AppleTV? 24, Battlestar Galactica (no new episodes until October, dammit), CSI Miami, The Dresden Files, Heroes, House (at LONG LAST!), Jericho (canceled after a cliffhanger season closer - sometimes I hate networks), Law & Order: SUV, the Mac/PC ads (yes, I edited all the metadata to make them into a TV show), Monk, My Friends Tigger & Pooh (my kids love it), The Riches (Eddie Izzard ROCKS), Southpark, and Spin City (okay, not on iTunes, but I ripped my 2 "best of DVDs", made h264's out of them, and then mucked with the metadata so they looked like TV shows - I'll stipulate it's not a consumer scenario).

I work for Microsoft and love the company and our products- so don't get me wrong, I will take all that I love about Apple's approach and strongly encourage my colleagues around the company to learn from it and do it better. And for the record, I should mention that I am also living the Vista Media Center Dream: I have as many Xboxes as AppleTVs connected to 2 Vista based media center PCs (each w/ 2TB of storage) because iTunes doesn't have nearly everything we watch as a family - and I don't want to pay $1.99 for every episode of something I watch. Oh, and Xboxes are DVD players, too (and for $199, they can be HD-DVD players). Oh, and my Xboxes play games. And they cost the same as an AppleTV - $299. And they are only... ummm... a TEENY bit bigger than an AppleTV.

Truth is, both companies are great companies in their own right. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates both can be proud of what they have built - they both already have amazing legacies. Look at me - I'm trying to have my cake, and eat it too!

Posted by Craig at 6:44 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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There was a dead mouse in our house at lunch today, and KT & I got into an IM discussion about the hantavirus (don't ask!) Anyway, one thing lead to another, and I discovered a cool CDC feature that lets you look at leading causes of death across the range of states/ages/genders/race. So here's what's gonna kill me in the near future:

20 Leading Causes of Death, Washington
1999 - 2004, White, Non-Hispanic, Males
Age Group 41-42

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I bought my very first hard drive for $400. It was a 40mb drive that I put into an IBM PS/2 model 25 (How you gonna do it? PS/2 it!), replacing one of the two 720kb 3.5" floppy drives. I was never a PC person before that, but I had won my PS/2 in a drawing that IBM did on campus at the University of Waterloo, way way back when I was a grad student there. Summer of 1989, to be exact. That PC is what turned me away from Unix and MVS - I was THIS close to being a mainframe programmer.

Anyway, fast forward almost eighteen years. I just bought a hard drive for $400:

DAMN!!

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A colleague at work forwarded me an article in the Mercury News Interactive that speculated why I was back at Microsoft. A line from the article "you don't put a guy of his caliber in charge of cleaning out the toilets" made me smile and inspired me to do a little Photoshoping of the Mr. Rooter home page.

Happy MondayTuesday!

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Now shipping from PC Connection. Oh, and while they're at it, Hitachi tossed on 32MB of cache. 8 times the memory I had in my first 386. Go figure.

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This kind of self-deprecating marketing/promotion is brilliant - an internal Kodak production that was so popular with employees Kodak released it to the web. I've watched twice now it is so damn funny, and along the way, I learned all kinds of cool stuff Kodak is doing from wireless to GPS. And apparently we're all going to be taking pictures like Annie Leibovitz - booooo-yah!

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It's sadly a camera phone picture, but it isn't bad. I love that I have a job where I can have a Xbox in my office. Sadly, I had to pay an Amazon affiliate a premium to get it, but I got it on time and as promised!

So first the obvious, the HDMI connection and the 120gb harddisk are great upgrades (after upgrading several Apple TVs to 160gb drives, I am now tempted to do the same here ). I love the new black look, but it does clash with the five I have - yes, 5, more on that in another blog. I've been livin' the Media Center dream since Vista RTMed back in November, with two PC's recording TV and the Xbox 360's as Extenders/DVD players/HD DVD players.

What I love best about the Xbox 360 Elite is that you get everything you need - an HDMI cable, component cables, a connector for audio out if you have digital audio or are doing HDMI to DVI and need audio, a network cable, a headset, a wireless controller. Contrast this with my Playstation 3 (cheapest BluRay player on the market ), where they make a big stink about HDMI and 1080p and hi-def and then give you stinkin' RCA jack connectors. Yeesh. And don't even get me started about PS3 being bluetooth and so you can't just open your DVD remote (sold separately) and use it - you have to follow a whole page of instructions on how to connect it. Bah! This wasn't supposed to be a PS3 rant, so I'll stop now. Except to say that Virtua Fighter 5 is cool (I've had a soft spot for Virtua Fighter since they ported to DirectX back in 1995/1996).

Anyway, the Elite is pretty hot - I dig it. Back to more Project Gotham Racer research .

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The Supreme Court passed down a ruling yesterday calling for a change in the obviousness test for patents. It took a squabble over gas pedal design of all things, but the bell just tolled the beginning of the end of these nonsense software patents that have made me crazy all the years I have worked in the industry. Oh, sure, some people are all bug-eyed and freaked out because the Supreme Court didn't dictate the exact wording of how the obviousness test should change, but that wasn't their job - their job was just to say "it's busted, you idiots, go fix it." Which they did!

My favorite quotes from the ruling:

• "Granting patent protection to advances that would occur in the ordinary course without real innovation retards progress and may, in the case of patents combining previously known elements, deprive prior inventions of their value or utility"
• "It is common sense that familiar items may have obvious uses beyond their primary purposes, and a person of ordinary skill often will be able to fit the teachings of multiple patents together like pieces of a puzzle"
• "When there is a design need or market pressure to solve a problem and there are a finite number of identified, predictable solutions, a person of ordinary skill in the art has good reason to pursue the known options within his or her technical grasp. If this leads to the anticipated success, it is likely the product not of innovation but of ordinary skill and common sense."
• "Rigid preventative rules that deny recourse to common sense are neither necessary under, nor consistent with, this Court's case law."
• "We build and create by bringing to the tangible and palpable reality around us new works based on instinct, simple logic, ordinary inferences, extraordinary ideas, and sometimes even genius. These advances, once part of our shared knowledge, define a new threshold from which innovation starts once more. And as progress beginning from higher levels of achievement is expected in the normal course, the results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than promote, the progress of useful arts." AMEN!

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