Oliver Steele

One —- but only one —- reason for Apple’s appeal is that Apple products are luxury goods. (I’ll get to the second reason in a moment.) Apple products compete on design, not price. The Apple stores, with their hardwood floors and wide open spaces, are modeled after a luxury car showroom, and don’t share the convenience store layout and shelving of other computer stores.

Focusing on the high end of the market is a reasonable strategy¹. (Sony is trying it with the VAIO.) In an area that depends on third parties to create programs and peripherals, this strategy has a benefit beyond high profit margins. Hardware and software makers are disproportionately interested in Apple’s customers, because these customers have shown themselves to be disproportionately willing to spend money on computer products. This is why Apple can have 1% of the desktop market but —- unlike Linux in 2004 —- command compatability from web sites and large software vendors. Selling to Apple customers is like opening a store in Beverly Hills; if the products are good enough to sell there, it’s worth the real estate cost.  read more »

Over the past thirty years, the American Computer Corporation (ACA) has introduced personal computers, and in particular the bitmap display and the desktop metaphor, into the economy.

The ACA is a virtual company, composed of the following departments. The heyday for each department is given in parenthesis after the name of the real company that implements that virtual department.  read more »

• Research: Xerox (‘70s)

• Development: Apple (late ’70s/‘80s)

• Marketing: Microsoft (late ’80s/early ’90s¹)

• Distribution: Dell (‘90s/‘00s)

Do you have an old teletype with a 5-bit serial interface sitting around that you’ve been itching to hook up to the Internet? If so, this article at LinuxDevices.com is just what you’ve been looking for. — anonymous on Slashdot

Henry Minsky has written in LinuxDevices about his Internet Teletype. This is a vintage teletype he purchased on eBay, that is connected through a Mini-ITX and a web server to an email account. The email account is in turn connected to his Yahoo calendar.  read more »

In the early nineties, On Technologies released a wonderful product, called Instant Update, which allowed multiple workers to view and edit a shared rich text document. Many authors could edit the document at once, changes to separate paragraphs were resolved automatically, and a simple dialog box let you choose how to resolve each conflict. Each paragraph was marked as to who last modified it when.

Unlike Microsoft Word, which now does some of this (but didn’t then), publishing your changes was as simple as pressing the “Update” button.  read more »

Monday night, and it’s raining hard. Yahoo weather says the rain ended at noon. No, wait, it says it will end at midnight.

The Yahoo weather page has a strip of icons across the top, and a text description following that. The icon says AM Rain. The description extends it to midnight. Presumably the description was updated more recently.

I find it useful to look at the icon first. It indicates how accurate these predictions are. If the icon doesn’t tell you what’s happening right now, the prediction isn’t likely to tell you what will happen tomorrow.  read more »

Or, easements for WiFi.

I can use a wireless access point for one of two purposes. I can place it inside my (home or corporate) intranet and make it secure. Or I can place it outside my intranet, and broadcast its presence to WAR drivers. But I can’t do both.

[Actually, I can’t do the first, because WEP isn’t secure. But WPA will fix this problem, and it won’t fix the other one.]  read more »

Dave Winer misses the point of the Semantic Web. Winer criticizes RDF as though it were an application, intended for direct interaction with users creating and searching content. RDF isn’t an application; it’s an operating system, on which applications can be built.

Semantic Silos

“Proponents of The Semantic Web want to boil the ocean by getting people to change the way they write for the Web.”