Not politics but organisational technology and its ramifications get discussed heavily on this site. James Gosling wrote:

As several people have noticed at my talks over the past few months, I no longer carry a Mac laptop. As much as I love the Mac's eye candy, it really hasn't been keeping up as a developer's machine - their attention has clearly been elsewhere.

I agree. I have an iBook G4 which is several years old now and has done good service. It has travelled across three continents with me. Its frame is bent, it has no paint on many of the keys and has cracks in the plastic. It is a useful machine - except for development. I am stuck in Java 1.4 and I had all sorts of issues getting Python 2.5 on it. This means I cannot run Eclipse 3.2 either. Windows and Linux are far more reliable as development machines and environments because tools will be built for them no matter how old the operating system. Apple obsoletes what it supports very quickly in computing technology terms.

This now means I will take that into account when making purchases. It will also mean that I will be keeping a Windows/Linux machine around no matter what. OSX is a wonderful operating system but Apple has chosen to make technologies and their support specific to their operating system versions. Which is fine. It is their choice, however it impacts me in how long I can use the machine as a development environment. Something which is important to me.

Despite OSX being the best operating system around at the moment there are trade offs. The single vendor issue being one. Another is that Safari is not particularly good, it is inferior to Firefox, though both put memory pressures on the G4s. I have found that each new update makes my laptop run significantly slower. Especially Safari. Which is disappointing.

The upshot is that there is no one winner in the operating system wars and I cannot choose a single environment. I suspect that may always be the case and despite the inanities in Windows and the haphazard support for new devices in Linux, I will end up running all three at any one time.

Rusty Elliote Harald records Wilhelm Fitzpatrick writing on the java-dev mailing list:

There's a Java oriented software conference called No Fluff Just Stuff that's been going on for the past six years. When I first started going, I was one of the only guys carrying a Mac. Over the last couple years, Macs have sprung up like weeds, and more importantly, nearly all the presenters were carrying them.

This year, the Mac were still there, but the first thing most presenters did was fire up Parallels and flip over to XP/Vista or Linux. That's not going to sell many Macs when they are just being used as stylish Windows machines...

I need to replace my iBook and the best laptops going are Apples. I will be getting a Macbook, at least it will get me up to date with the Java and Python development environments - for the next couple of years anyway. It will be interesting to see when OSX doesn't become worth it to me and the trade offs to large for me to purchase an Apple laptop. I certainly won't be purchasing an Apple desktop; that will be the domain of Windows/Linux for the foreseeable future.

When you buy something from Apple the packaging has emblazoned on it conspiciously, "Designed in California." Obviously the hardware is made in China. Holden is making the same transition: providing high value and highly profitable engineering services to its global parent company. Design is another high value area where Holden is making a mark with designs like the Torana, Efijay and now the VE Monaro Coupe.

Holden does very little manufacturing in comparison to the engineering it does such as the VE platform, the Chevrolet Camaro, and the global variants of its Commodore/Statesman vehicles. I expect a day will come when it no longer does the capital intensive and low profit manufacturing, replacing it instead with engineering and design services - much like Apple does.

This is the clever country is it not? Why the crying over Mitsubishi manufacturing going offshore when it was heavily subsidised by government anyway?

I used to have a Blackberry and found it extremely useful. Last year and the early part of this year I made do with a normal phone as I wasn't ever too far from an internet connection. Amongst other things my circumstances have changed recently. Discovering that Verizon was ripping me blind and that the iPhone plan gave me more for less, I bit.

Image from Information Architects

Probably a bad time to purchase as the iphone 2.0 is due out soon, but whatever; either way I have found it useful already.

Like most of these things they are not necessarily for everyone, but I needed seamless email integration anywhere. The interface for the iphone which let me connect up to gmail through the main email interface is excellent. The most useful part of the phone for me.

I put all my music on it, but the iPod (or nanoPod, I have both of several generations) is a better form factor for music playing. Enough that I will still use my nanoPod at work to listen to music rather than the phone. So the iphone has limited utility there.

The browser component is far, far, superior to the same functionality on the blackberry and will come in handy when I am travelling; Which is when I need that type of thing most.

The contacts list is also written for the modern technorati and integrates with web functions. Rather than a phone list - like it is on most phones, it allows you to express a contacts web persona or personality with multiple emails etc. Hitting the contact's page means multiple forms of communication are a click away; txt, voice or email. It is well done.

The voice mail is very useful as well. It is like playing a wav file. I would let multiple voice mails build up on prior phones as it was a pain to log in, go through them one by one, hit 7, hit whatever, go through the voice activated interface; ugh. The computer screen paradigm works very well with voicemail.

One of the downsides of the iphone is that it doesn't hold charge well. It sucks the juice quickly, more quickly than other PDAs I have had in the past.

All in all it is an excellent piece of functional equipment that I have found useful immediately.

Don't recall being asked if safari and quicktime could write themselves there. Apple supposedly prides itself on its out of box experience OOBE. Fails miserably in this instance. I had to delete it off the desktop too.

I bought my iPhone only recently, I was a slow adopter and despite the rumors of the next-gen iPhone I didn't think the hardware changes would be significant enough. I was right, what it is now is enough for me.

I was wrong about the price drop though, I did not see that coming. I payed $500 USD for mine and the next generation ones start at $200 USD. Quite a significant change in price and one which will probably put Apple into direct competition with RIM's Blackberry range. However, the devil is in the details, and the US telecoms are almost 'Telstra rapine' in their appetities. As Johnathon LaClour writes:

Over the course of the two year contract, an iPhone 3G will cost you a full $360 more than a first-generation iPhone would. This means that with the same ATT service plans, the $199 8GB iPhone 3G will actually end up costing you $559, where an 8 GB iPhone 1.0 will cost you only $399, representing a savings of $160! The iPhone 3G isn't cheaper at all, it is in fact far more expensive.

I feel the same. I am content with my current purchase and can do without the extra charges. Ironically I bought the iPhone for the hardware. I will pay good dollars for it, but I consider the cellphone and data service a commodity, which should be cheap considering the number of service providers. ATT obviously disagrees with me though and sees their service as a luxury that people will pay through the nose for. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the market.

The counter point is that I may just be a grumpy old arsehole who thinks the commodity component of a service should be deflating, not inflating, and that digital movement of information, such as data and text messaging should be decreasing in price, not increasing. The cell providers in the US have been going the other way. There was recently an article which compared the cost per byte to recover the data from a hard drive in a crashed Space Shuttle, and it was cheaper than text messaging.

Whatever the market will bear. It is a shame that NASA doesn't offer text messaging services though.

Via Arstechnica, Yahoo has closed down its music service and now the keys to the music as part of that product are lost. People cannot play the music they leased - rather than purchased I guess - from Yahoo. It is a good argument against DRM and subscribing to any DRM service or product.

I do use iTunes and occasionally buy songs from it. They are covered by DRM or digital rights management known as Fairplay. The only real way I have control over the songs is to burn them to a music CD and then re-import. A hopelessly manual and laborious process - and consequently a sufficient deterrent against me doing it.

The iTunes DRM has some really weird restrictions on it too; from the wiki article:

The track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players.

The track may be played on up to five authorized computers simultaneously. (Apple stores this information on their servers)

A particular playlist within iTunes containing a FairPlay-encrypted track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed.

The track may be copied to a standard Audio CD any number of times.

For the most part I have few enough songs that I have bought from iTunes that it isn't a big deal if I lose them all. The music that I really like is still purchased on CD or integrated from other people's music collections.

One issue that it did raise was when I got divorced recently. Normally physical music collections are easily and quickly divided up. But with DRM music who gets to keep the authorized computers and accounts? As it turned out I got a new iTunes account because it was not my email that we used. But the songs we had purchased stayed authorized on my ex-wifes Macbook. Not mine.

Fortunately the music collection was small enough that it did not become a property issue, but I suspect if DRM hangs around and someone has a non-trivial iTunes music collection in the thousands of dollars a judge somewhere will be making a judgement on how the DRM'd files are split. It may not be to Apple's liking either.

Update: Yahoo is offering the downloaded mp3s without DRM to its customers caught out by the store closing.

Neatorama has an interesting article that looks at the history of logos at certain companies and how they evolve over time. It is interesting how many evolved to just be a text font, while other changed their logo shape and style to match the times.

More: A logo blog which keeps up to date with the changing logos and company branding.

Business Week has an article on aspects of Apple's design process. The pixel perfect mockups cannot be under-estimated as to how tight a product it makes, especially when QA can combine tests around the pixel perfect placements (the company I am with has product, user experience, engineering, etc departments). The rest of the points made don't particularly catch me as that great.

Engineering is always under resource pressure - and often technical pressure - to give product and user experience exactly what they want. It is products goal to come up with the OMG Ponies feature or product and than negotiate with engineering on technical, resource and skills as to what can be produced within the business timelines.

Product/UE is Engineering's customers and I consider it Engineering's place to say yes to Product/UE rather than no unless it is technically impossible, then it only becomes a resource and marketing issue.

The problem is that attitude can lead to some cowboyish outcomes, but then software is the current tech world's gun-slingers, so I am comfortable with that. I personally like betting on our guys to come through.

One of the other things we do is give the developers working on a feature direct access to UE rather than having to go through the spec explicitly so that the UE designers vision can be maximized within that feature. One of the benefits of that method is that developer can mention other technical possibilities within that feature that the UE designer was not aware of. Good work has come out of that.