Apple’s Future Secure
Apparently Apple’s future is secure. Tonight’s Star Trek Voyager episode on Space (Good Shepherd, 2000), featured a shot of a computer screen on the Delta Flyer conspicuously displaying a Macintosh cursor zipping around.
Archive for February, 2005
Mac Use Up at Yale
There’s an interesting article at YaleDailyNews.com that discusses a resurgence in interest in the Macintosh platform.
I think the headline (Tables turn in campus Mac vs. Windows feud) is a bit sensationalistic, but the comments made by students are interesting.
Rather than the tired, old refrains of “Macs suck”, “Macs always crash” or “Macs are too expensive” (although one does make that claim), the comments from the Windows crowd are more along the lines of “I’m mostly doing word processing; buying a Mac seems like overkill”.
Even the IT department is vendor-neutral.
Obscure U2 Tracks Bubble to Surface
I’ve been a U2 fan for a long time, but when Apple and U2 released The Complete U2, I went through it pretty carefully. Despite owning every CD single that I was able to get my hands on since 1984, there were a few obscure tracks I hadn’t even heard of.
These are the links to iTunes (they work with the Canadian Store, and I assume they’ll work elsewhere):
- Outake 2: Sixty Seconds In Kingdom Come, a track from The Unforgettable Fire
- Beautiful Ghost / Introduction to Songs of Experience (From The Joshua Tree Sessions)
These tracks are worth checking out if you’re a fan of mid-80s U2.
Pop-up Blockers Subverted?
Yesterday, for the first time in many, many months, I saw a pop-under ad while surfing with Apple’s Safari (current version).
Others have recently noticed this, and it’s not limited to Apple’s browser; Firefox, Mozilla and other browsers with pop-up/pop-under disabling features have fallen victim. Advertisers seem to have found a work-around.
This still seems to be a minor issue, but it’s worth keeping an eye on…
Gates Announces IE7
Bill Gates has announced that Microsoft will be releasing Internet Explorer 7 ahead of the release of Longhorn (as previously planned).
This suggests to me that
- Microsoft is feeling the heat from Firefox
- Longhorn isn’t coming soon enough to placate angry customers (big, corporate ones, that is, who are tired of security issues and malware)
It’ll be interesting to see if IE7 resolves any of the many issues (broken CSS box model, PNG transparency, etc.) web developers have been hoping to see fixed. I’m betting on half-baked security fixes and no improvements on the standards-compliance front. Call me cynical.
