Tag: Mac

Daring Fireball makes some good points about the shrinking Macintosh market share.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, personal computers were generally only purchased and used by people who were “into” computers. Today, however, many computers are purchased for use as generic business machines, modern-day typewriters and adding machines.

It does seem that the more people are “into” computers, the more likely they are to be Mac users (not suggesting a direct correlation, only a perceived correspondence). And it is gratifying to see some journalists grok that comparing Mac and PC marketshare is comparing apples and oranges, so to speak. Apple doesn’t try to compete in all computing market segments. May as well critique sports cars or riding mowers for not having the same marketshare as SUVs.

One distraction after another for weeks has kept me from spending much time prepping the XServe, but got to get cozy again with it this week. Today finally dropped it in the rack and went into production. The Win2K machine had become so fragile and unpredictable I really didn’t expect it to live this long – could no longer start or stop any services, drag files, or access any properties panels. Windows eats itself, scares the hell out of me sometimes (virus hunts turned up nothing). For the first time since I’ve been at the J-School, I feel 100% good about the server situation.

The dual 1GHz XServe is lightning fast, a dream to work with, but it was surprising to discover how different from OS X client it is. Lots of prefs panels moved to other locations or integrated into other functions, and lots of new utilities not found in X client. They’ve done a pretty good job of creating a workable GUI for the most-used Apache config options, including virtual hosts. This is tricky though, since it means a GUI panel reading and writing text files. So what they’ve done is provided a standard httpd.conf, which in turn has an include for httpd_macosxserver.conf. The latter is machine read/writable. You can hand-edit either of them, with a few caveats.

Other stuff present in OS X Server not found in client (though most anything can be installed in client, they’ve done a great job of integrating and providing interfaces for this stuff in Server): Tomcat (JSP), PHP/MySQL, QuickTime Streaming Server, LDAP / Active Directory integration, full user/group mountpoints/permissions controls (using either locally stored or directory users), WebObjects, MacManager (for remote management of lab Macs), NetBoot (lets you host a disk image that networked client OS X machines will seek out and boot from), POP/SMTP/IMAP mail serving (being overhauled for Panther), a full suite of server monitoring tools (CPU temp, blower speed, disk space etc. — will email or page notifications on problems), a full suite of remote control apps, fully configurable FTP server, SLP tools… the list goes on.

Migrating from Win2K was mostly a matter of transferring my httpd config options into the new arrangement, adjusting a bunch of PHP includes, appropriately unix-ifying permissions on the MySQL databases, setting up logins and shares parallel to what we had, locking things down as necessary. Still have some less-apparent work to do (most notably getting a replacement search engine set up), but it’s going to be great to not have to sit under the fans in the server room to do it!

Had a great visit from an Apple rep yesterday, came to help us solve some persistent Final Cut Pro lab issues. When he booted his laptop, saw this great wallpaper — an x-ray of the very TiBook he was using. He sent me a copy. Higher-def version for posterity here. Something about this seems vaguely naughty, like it must have felt in the 1800s to catch a glimpse of a woman’s calf or something.

Interesting argument by Tig Tillinghast:

Microsoft makes more money on Office per Mac sold than they do per PC sold. And they claim that Internet Explorer’s ubiquity is not to foster monopoly, but because the market demands it and it’s necessary for integration with Office. By this logic, IE/Mac is a key part of MS’ ability to generate profit from the Mac. So then how do they square that position with their recent decision to drop IE/Mac?

My take: Safari has proven that Apple and the open source community together can build a better, far faster browser, without Microsoft’s help. Technology isn’t the issue. Politics is. Potential switchers want comfort food, want to know that IE is waiting for them on the Mac side (even if it’s slow). Microsoft’s move punishes Apple for threatening the monopoly by pulling a security blanket away from potential customers.

Christmas in June: Found out today there’s a very high chance I’ll soon be able to replace the Win2K server that runs the J-School with an Xserve. Possibly dual. I’m floating on this news. Getting very tired of the tools I want to use not working properly with Windows (e.g. the bad netpbm port to Windows just hung up my attempt to get Gallery installed, and the search engine I want to deploy is only free if you aren’t serving from Windows), and even more tired of Windows consuming itself. It’s appropriate for rock stars to choke on their own vomit — it isn’t appropriate for operating systems. The Xserve will integrate with our systems much more smoothly, and I’ll be able to sleep better at night (like Miles has nothing to do with that :). The conversion should be a great summer project … as if I had a shortage of summer projects.

Tim O’Reilly has some interesting comments on the common notion that Apple is an innovator, Microsoft a copier. His position is that Apple doesn’t really innovate that much more than other companies — what they do is to package and market difficult technologies in such a way that people realize they need them the minute they see them in action — AirPort, Rendezvous… all technologies that were sort of inchoate in the industry — Apple polishes things like this to a high gloss and makes them into fetish objects. By the time MS gets around to similar, it’s clip art.

Example: Tim is especially enamored of Rendezvous, which is impressing me more all the time. The zeroconf spec has been floating out there for a while, but Apple implemented it at the OS level and started building it into apps. Now my browser has automatic, real-time bookmarks to every user’s homepage on every Apache-running Mac on my subnet, iTunes can see the collections of every iTunes user on the home network, and so on.

Aside: Customer Reports on customer satisfaction with Macs.

Update: In the comments, Allistair McMillan points out that Rendezvous actually is an Apple technology – I stand corrected (this takes a bit of the wind out of Tim’s sails as well). FireWire removed from the above list – not sure why that was there to begin with, der.

All my curiosity about whether iTunes 4’s streaming capabilities amounted to webcasting or not turns out to have been on target — version 4.01 is out, and Apple has yanked the feature. Turns out that merely marking the feature “for personal use only” was insufficient — people found ways to list streams for public consumption within weeks. Apple says they’re “disappointed” that a few bad eggs ruined it for everyone else, which strikes me as funny — as if Mac users were a bunch of kids that Apple thought had all grown up, only to discover that, nope, we’re not ready to own a Daisy B-B Gun after all since we still leave our bicycle in the driveway*.

One has to wonder whether Apple’s new relationship with the big labels forced their hand here — I had assumed that the five-listener limit was one of the “reasonable compromises” Apple had reached with the labels, and that they fully knew what they were getting into with this limited form of webcasting. In retrospect, it looks as if either Apple or the labels got cold feet after releasing the feature, and backpedaled. Anyway you slice it, this is disappointing step backwards. I was getting a lot of perfectly legal mileage out of it, too.

Great discussion at MacSlash.

*Sorry for the obscure reference — when I was a kid there was often an ad on the back of comics that showed a kid leaving his bike in the driveway in the path of dad’s car, thus demonstrating he wasn’t yet mature enough to own his first gun.

OS X client doesn’t include useradd or groupadd utils, probably as small encouragement to spring for OS X Server. That means that if you do a colo with OS X client, you’re screwed if you need to add users. OSXUserUtils fixes that (use the -m flag to override a dir creation bug in this version).

You can run repair permissions from the command line, i.e. via cron job.

Show Desktop: The best thing about Windows, now available for the Mac (be sure to enable the menu bar option).

Lars Duening left a very detailed comment on the Drive Dock post, with his observations on the comparative user experience between Aqua and X11/KDE.

Showed my boss iTunes’ new remote music sharing (but not downloading) feature today and he immediately tagged it as webcasting. Is it webcasting? If so, then does this form of sharing require royalties to be paid? Who will determine whether I’m just listening to my home collection from work (or vice versa) or casting my collection to 100 listeners (assuming I had that much upstream bandwidth)? And so what if I am? I’m not sharing the files with them, only the performance. And if sharing the performance is a problem, does that mean I can’t have a party and play a CD for everyone who attends?

Gray areas, but you can begin to see why iTunes throws an alert “This feature is for personal use only” when sharing is activated.