Doc Searls Blogs Apple Conference

This is a play-by-play of the speech made by Steve Jobs.

###Some Hilights

  • Apple is now the largest UNIX supplier in the world.
  • Interesting how hard it is to make a rack mounted box look anything other than purely utilitarian. Except for the fact that this is Apple and Steve, this show so far is little different than countless other announcements I’ve seen by Sun, IBM, Tandem… Storage flexibility… The meta-message: Apple means business.
  • Apple, it now appears to me, is walking the Earth, picking up and putting to use all kinds of freely available innerstructure. They seem to be careful not to position themselves against other UNIXes. Or anything in particular, other than the high costs of Windows. I think they expect this stuff to be added, like a new crop, to existing server farms.
  • Alex Grossman, director of server and storage at Apple. Steve just opened up another part of the demo rack. 14 drive bays in on e horizontal enclosure. 1.68″terrorbytes” of storage per rack set. Dual 2Gb Fibre Channel… Redundant drives, power, cooling… Independent ATA controllers. RAID processor, 128 MB of processor cache.
  • Now this sucker is looking like a moon, quietly sliding in front of the Sun.
  • More positioning as a UNIX company. People are calling us who never used to want to talk to us…. We’re in a lot of Fortune 500 accounts… Calls a past server exploration as a dream when Apple was in a coma.
  • It’s over. Now we go to the piano bar. Talked to Steve (Jobs) on the way. Asked him what other server farm crops this would likely run alongside. Everything, he said. Linux, BSD, Sun…

###Some Thoughts

YEAH! It looks like Apple is making the right moves to stick around for a while.

Be Careful of CDs in Your Computer

Mac users may want to check the labels on their music CDs twice, as copy-protected audio discs flooding the market may lead to serious problems when they are played on some computer systems.

Unlike standard audio CDs, copy-protected audio discs embed software that seeks to block certain uses of songs, for example, preventing consumers from copying the tracks onto a hard drive. Sony, whose Epic label published Dion’s “A New Day has Come,” has included a warning telling customers that the disc is not compatible with Macs or PCs.

When are these companies going to learn that the best thing to do is to stick to the industry accepted standards.

Could Episode II Suck This Bad?

I hope this isn’t true.

…And you’re struck with the depressing realization that we’d have all been far better off if Lucas had just left well enough alone, leaving EPISODEs I-III to our imagination…

Maybe this’ll be a good thing. I’ve already committed to going into Episode II with lowered expectations… this just lowered them more. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly suprised?