Last month, I mentioned Microsoft spending $300 million dollars on a Bill Gates and Seinfeld advertising campaign. Well this month, Apple has replied with its own ad:

I don't know how much Apple spent on this ad, I'm pretty sure its much less than $300 million dollars and yet this single rejoinder ad is 10 times more effective than any of Microsoft's advertisments.

For science afficinados who are interested in following the absolute latest news on NASA's Mars Explorer, Phoenix, there is now a new way. Thanks to the Internet (and possibly some astronomy grad students over at Arizona University who had too much spare time), the NASA team is sending out news snippets directly to interested parties via twitter.com.

You can catch the Phoenix's transmissions at http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix. You can even send messages to it and a few lucky fellas actually get replies from the machine!

I must really give kudos to NASA for really adopting the web as a means of communicating with the public.

During January's MacWorld 2008 Keynote speech, Steve Jobs introduced the Time Capsule product that allow Leopard users to backup their data wirelessly to a Time Capsule. I pointed out at that time that the Time Capsule:

1. Was nothing more than an Airport Extreme Base Station with a built in server-grade Hard Disk.


2. Was way too expensive as a product.


3. That Apple should have just enabled wireless backup on the Airport Extreme instead of introducing the Time Capsule

Well lo and behold with this week's Airport Extreme update, Apple has done exactly what I said in point 3. The Airport Extreme can now wirelessly backup to any attached USB drive via Time Machine. This update exactly duplicates what the Time Capsule is doing at a much, much cheaper price point.

Way to go Apple, I pity all the early adopters who went to buy the expensive Time Capsule when they could have waited two months and buy an Airport Extreme and USB drive for the exact same functionality at half the Time Capsule price.

Today I stumbled upon a video that presents a very interesting viewpoint on piracy. It basically says, if you're a corporation who is suffering from piracy issues, then there is something wrong with your business and your business model. I know, it sounds wierd when I present it like that, but if you watch the video it actually makes sense. So without further ado, here is the video of The Medici Summit on March 3, 2008 on the topic "The Pirate's Dilemma".

If you're interested in knowing more, read Matt Mason's The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism.

Apple has had a pretty good track record of introducing innovative and well designed products at their annual MacWorld Expo over the past 4 to 5 years. However, this year's MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs has gotten it all wrong. Here is the final part of my article detailing what I think went wrong.


Part Four: MacBook Air
When I first saw the new sub-notebook introduced by Apple, my first thought was that it is designed for the working woman. The MacBook Air is something a sales person or insurance would want to carry around for their jobs. Indeed the petite svelte notebook would even help enhance the sales pitch.

Things started going downhill once it was apparent that Apple has made a lot of compromises on the world's thinnest notebook. For example, the lack of an Etherenet port means that you can only connect the MacBook Air to a wireless network. Personally, that is the killer issue for me. Apple is assuming that wireless networks are now ubiquitous and that we can connect to any wireless network we wish. The reality is quite different. Yes, wireless networks are quite common these days but most companies also understand the security risks involved and either intentionally do not deploy a wireless network or only provide very restricted access to company resources via a wireless network. Even with Singapore and its Wireless@SG initiative, not every public area has a usable wireless connection. In the United States, I have stayed in hotels such as the Holiday Inn near Washington, Double Tree in New York that only offer wired network connections in every room. These are all stumbling blocks that a roaming user of the MacBook Air will face on a daily basis.

The single USB port is another issue that complicate matters because it means having to lug around an additional USB hub to expand the number of USB ports available. Apple could have used an internal built in hub and save its users the hassle. Besides the two issues I have mentioned, there are a host of other myriad issues that comes from the compromises Apple has made to come up with such a tiny laptop. Issues such as slow bootups, an extremely hot base and so on.

My guess is the market will view MacBook Air as a niche product that will be purchased for its looks and small size. Thanks to Steve Job's reality distortion field, MacBook Air might turn out to be a popular item but I am thinking it will never be as popular as its bigger brothers, the MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Apple has had a pretty good track record of introducing innovative and well designed products at their annual MacWorld Expo over the past 4 to 5 years. However, this year's MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs has gotten it all wrong. This is part three of a four part article detailing what I think went wrong.

Part Three: iTunes Movie Rentals

During Steve Job's keynote speech, he mentioned that so far no company has been truly successful in converging the television with computers and the Internet. Apple's last attempt was the AppleTV and it failed. This year, they are having a second attempt with a revamped AppleTV and the new iTunes Movie Rentals service.

Here is my 8 ball prediction: Sorry Apple, it still won't work.

In this day and age of instant availability provided by Internet companies like YouTube, and DivX's Stage6, people want more than just movies. People also want television shows. In fact, I'll even assert that both television shows and movies will not be enough. The internet era television needs made for Internet programs that cater to mobile viewers who can watch any show any where and at any time. I have digressed quite a bit off from the original topic, which is Apple's second attempt at television convergence.

A simple movie rental service would not capture any significant market. Apple's iTunes Movie Rentals service however, is much worse than a movie rental service. It is an exorbitantly expensive premium (roughly S$4.50 per DVD movie) movie rental service that has the slowest release dates (new movies are only available 30 days after DVDs are available for sale) and has an incredibly short rental time (24 hours). Just check around. Even in Singapore, I can find a rental service that is cheaper, allows me to rent both movies as well as television shows, and allow me to watch the rented DVDs over any period of time I wish.

On the whole, iTunes Movie Rentals is simply not compelling enough.

Apple has had a pretty good track record of introducing innovative and well designed products at their annual MacWorld Expo over the past 4 to 5 years. However, this year's MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs has gotten it all wrong. This is part two of a four part article detailing what I think went wrong.

Before I begin, let me first say that I will not be discussing the iPhone updates mainly because the iPhone will probably not be available in Singapore before 2009 (or late 2008 if a miracle happens).

Part Two: iPod Touch Paid Software Upgrade
Before today, I have always said that Apple's strategy with the iPod Touch was perfect. Apple had positioned the iPod Touch as a premium/future version of the iPod both in the US and abroad. More importantly, the iPod Touch is perfectly positioned for people who want the iPhone now but cannot legally purchase the lickable phone in their country (such is the case in Singapore).

I am completely baffled as to why Apple has decided to "punish" first-mover customers who have bought an iPod Touch with a US$20 software upgrade cost. This is especially bad when Steve Jobs also announced that new iPod Touch customers get the exact same software update for free. Note that iPhone customers also received a largely similar software update for free too.

This is bound to leave a sour taste for existing international customers, such as those in Singapore, who have bought the iPod Touch. Unless Apple does something fast, I believe this will quickly turn into a public relations nightmare for both Apple's iPod and iPhone product lines.

Apple has had a pretty good track record of introducing innovative and well designed products at their annual MacWorld Expo over the past 4 to 5 years. However, this year's MacWorld keynote by Steve Jobs has gotten it all wrong. Lets follow the four step keynote speech that was given, shall we?

Part One: Time Capsule

The first new product introduced by Apple at MacWorld 2008 is the Time Capsule, a wireless backup solution that works exclusively with Leopard's Time Machine. I do admit that on the surface, the concept of the Time Capsule is nice. It matches especially well with Apple's strategy of predominant selling mobile laptops and sub-notebooks.

However, the Time Capsule is nothing more than Apple's AirPort Extreme Base Station with an internal 500GB hard drive plugged-in. I did a quick check at the online Singapore Apple Store today. The Time Capsule has an estimated cost of S$788, presumably for the 500GB model. On the other hand, the AirPort Extreme Base Station is selling for S$288. That is a 500 dollar difference, or exactly $1 per Gigabyte.

In contrast, you can get a 500 Gigabyte hard disk at Sim Lim Square today for no more than S$200. That is 40 cents per Gigabyte. As a backup solution, it would be much cheaper to simply buy an AirPort Extreme Base Station and a hard drive than to buy the Time Capsule. Naturally, Apple has foreseen this and surprise, surprise, the current AirPort Extreme firmware does not work with Time Machine.

Based on Apple's previous explanation, the only change required to turn the AirPort Extreme into a Time Capsule should be as simple as updating the firmware of the AirPort Extreme Base Station with some modified software. And being a Computer Scientist, I know it can be a moderately simple modification that should not involve more than modifying a hundred lines of code. It should be something that can be completely solved, debugged, tested and quality assured in a few engineering man days.

As it currently stands, even when I factor in the convenience of not having to physically connect up a server grade hard drive, I find it very difficult to accept Time Capsule's pricing. I find it even more difficult to comprehend why Apple did not upgrade AirPort Extreme Base Station as a cheaper solution.

Christmas is around the corner, I have been goofing off a little and here's the end product. A collection of "Mac vs PC" international ads, starting with some from Japan.

Here are some UK "Mac vs PC" ads.

Finally, I like to wish a very merry christmas to one and all!

In my article on why I switched to using a MacBook and Mac OS X, I mentioned Microsoft's use of incompatible or proprietary standards as a means of keeping non-Microsoft computer systems from easily communicating or accessing computers running Microsoft operating system and software. One of these proprietary Microsoft-only standards is the "Server Message Block" protocol (SMB for short) that runs the Microsoft Windows Network. Just about everything you see under (just everything you see under "Network Neighbourhood/Microsoft Network" uses SMB to share files, printers and serial ports.

For over the past 10 to 15 years, Microsoft has been adamant on not releasing sufficient details of the SMB protocol. Developers, such as those working on the Samba open source project, faced a constant uphill struggle trying to connect with the Microsoft Network. As a result, despite their best work, the Samba team never quite achieved full compatibility and interoperability with Windows-based computers.

Things changed today.

As a direct result of a 9 year investigation and legal wrangling, the European Union Commission judged (also upheld by the European Court of First Instance) that Microsoft had abused its monopoly position. As a result, Microsoft now has to license documentation on SMB and several other Microsoft proprietary protocols to interested parties in a reasonable and non-discriminatory manner. These documents have finally been delivered to the Samba team today, enabling them to start work on writing software that will be fully interoperable with Microsoft Windows operating systems.

For more details on the long struggle of the Samba team, please refer to this webpage they have written on this topic.

In my first article, I focused more on the topic of "Why I do not want another Microsoft OS". The reasons generally boils down to the general feeling that Microsoft is more interested in its own profit than listening and fulfilling its consumer's needs. Today, I will talk solely about Mac OS X and the reasons why I finally settled on it and Apple computers as my computer system of choice.

Solid Architecture

Building any complex software such as an operating system is sort of like building a house. And like a house, nothing is more important than a solid foundation. The foundation of Mac OS X is an Apple open source project called Darwin and Darwin in turn is based largely upon a relatively unknown operating system called FreeBSD.

Even tech circles, very few people know about FreeBSD's complicated origins that can be traced all the way back to the great grandfather of most operating systems, AT&T's UNIX. Thankfully, quite a lot more people know that FreeBSD has been built from ground up with system security and stability as its number one objective. And FreeBSD developers have done a good job in delivering both security and stability for FreeBSD has consistently had the least number of reported issues for the past few years and is commonly cited as the OS with some of the longest uptime (of years) when used as a web server.

As a result, not only has Mac OS X inherited some of FreeBSD's security and stability, it has also inherited the underpinnings of a modern Unix operating system. On top of this solid foundation, Apple has added on its own software stacks for graphical user interfaces, codenamed Aqua, and various innovations from NEXTSTEP (another operating system developed by Steve Job's prior company before returning to Apple, NeXT). All these factors combined made a compelling case to me that Mac OS X is a well designed, modern operating system.

One more thing before I move on. In today's world of hackers, scammers, viruses and spyware, I feel that commodity software that is used by just about everyone with a computer must be audited for security loopholes. And because the foundation of Mac OS X, Darwin, is open sourced, computing professionals can look at its freely available source code (blueprint and construction plans) While most users will never need to view these blueprints, it is an added level of reassurance that any computing professional can review these blueprints for potential vulnerabilities or exploitable loopholes. As an aside, Microsoft was required to open up its Windows operating system source code for review by third party experts in the anti-trust case for this exact same reason.

Common Standards

Standards are very important to the computing industry. They are sort of similar languages such as English or French and allow different computers to communicate with each other. Unlike human beings where anyone who understands English is likely to understand a regional dialect like Singlish, computers need standards specified clearly and distinctly. Any change, however minor, would essentially be treated as a totally different language by the computer.

If you have read my first article, you would know that one of my pet peeves with Microsoft is its habit of intentionally introducing incompatibilities when they implement computing standards. This in turn results in Windows computers that can only communicate with other Microsoft computers and is a bad thing for me. It means that I am stuck with using only Microsoft products and is unable to use any other alternative products, regardless of how good these products are. In a way, Microsoft's tactics can almost be considered racist (that is, if Microsoft is a race).

Apple can almost be considered a saint in comparison to Microsoft for they recognize the importance of standards. So far, every piece of hardware I own works with my MacBook. One additional bonus I found was that so far I have not needed to install nor scrounge around for any device drivers. Right out of the box, Mac OS X was able to automatically detect and use to my home wireless network (I just had to provide the password), print on any network printer, exchange data with my Nokia mobile phone via bluetooth, use any USB device that I plug in.

All this standards compliance applies to its software too. Mac OS X comes with web surfing, email, address book and calendar applications. All of them follow whatever common computing standards there are to follow. So I could easily swap calendar data with Google Calendar, contact information with my mobile phone. I have not tried this but I've read that with a software called Parallels, I can even run almost any Windows application. Even more, because Mac OS X has Unix as its foundation, most software written for Unix can probably run on Mac OS X. Before you laugh, consider that this includes software written for all Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Suse, Fedora, etc..), all BSD variants (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD), Sun Microsystem's Solaris and many more. And I do use quite a lot of Unix software so this is all a plus to me.

The Leopard Advantage

What I have said so far applies to every version of Mac OS X. In this final section, I deal specifically with the advantages offered by the latest version, Mac OS X Leopard. I have read some articles about Leopard before I made the jump to Apple laptops, and in general most people say that Leopard offers better eye candy and Time Machine, an easy to use automated backup solution.

My take stems largely from a developer's perspective and from that angle, Leopard's main advantage over other operating systems such as Vista or Ubuntu is something called "Core Animation". In order to explain Core Animation, I will need to delve in to some history regarding graphical user interfaces.

As some of you may know, a computer screen is a rectangular grid of dots, or "picture cells" (pixels for short). In the early days, what we did to create graphical user interfaces was literally to draw them dot by dot. It is tedious and error prone. This is why modern operating systems have "windowing toolkits" that allow us application developers to simply say, "I want a window of size 500 by 300, containing a button at..." and the operating system would take over and draw the window and its contents for us. Besides simply drawing windows and such, the windowing toolkit would also handle common graphical operations like simulating a button being pressed, maximizing or minimizing a window. Windowing toolkits allow application developers to create applications faster because we no longer have to handle every minute on screen detail that needs to be drawn.


Simply put, Core Animation is Apple's "toolkit" for 3d animations such as the now famous iTunes album browsing "Cover Flow" feature. With Core Animation, I as an application developer just need to say in my application that "I want a cover flow containing these 26 images, at this location, and tell me which image the user selects", and Core Animation would handle the details of drawing 3d boxes, rotating and juggling their positions on screen, animating them based on user input, and so on. Core Animation makes 3d animations very accessible to application developers. I am quite willing to bet that in 2008 to 2009 we will see many Leopard only applications integrating 3d elements that no other operating system can currently reproduce and that, to me, is Leopard's advantage.

Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, is a forward looking operating system that has taken the first step to move applications into a 3D animated paradigm. Ladies and gentlement, this is the cutting edge. The next few years should prove to be exciting.

Yes, I am now what Apple fans call a "switcher". As of November 2007, I am the owner of a brand new Apple MacBook Pro which is now my main working computer (I'm already running out of disk space lol). Since November, several of my friends have asked me various questions such as "Why switch?", "What are the advantages?". So far I have given one line answers because my real answer would require an understanding of my past 20 years of living and working in the trenches of the computer world war for brand dominance. Today is your lucky (or unlucky) day, for today I reveal the real answer to why I switched to a Mac.

Before I begin, let me state unequivocally that while I admit I am a technically inclined guy who occasionally take note of Apple related news, I am not an Apple fanboy. For the sake of disclosure, I have to mention that the very first computer I used 20 odd years ago as a 5 year old boy was an Apple ][+. You know, the one that contains a 1MHz processor, 5¼" floppy drive and green monochrome monitor. Anyway, my dad switched to an IBM PC XT clone some years later and that was the end of my relationship with Apple computers. I have been using Microsoft operating systems (DOS and Windows) ever since.

A Little Bit Of History

Here goes. One of the main reasons why I switched to a Mac is because I have a beef with the way Microsoft operates. A large part of this comes from Microsoft doing things for their own self interest rather than for the interest of its customers, business or consumer. A secondary but more personal beef is that Microsoft's tendency to think it has superior engineering and research capability when in fact the opposite is probably more true (or perhaps its engineers and researchers have been ignored by management needs).

The first time I discovered this was with my attempts at writing multitasked programs in the 80s. I will try not to be too technical in my explanation, but I have to offer my apologies as some technical know-how is still required. Multitasking basically enables a computer to simultaneously run more than one program and is a key feature that people cannot live without these days. It was first invented in the 1960s and by the 1970s most business operating systems such as Unix have multitasking. For the more technically inclined, when I say multitasking, I am refering to pre-emptive multitasking and not cooperative multitasking.

Yet, multitasking on Personal Computers were unheard of even in the 1980s. There were several reasons. The first reason was that multitasking required a multitasking enabled microprocessor that had very specific features. The first Intel PC microprocessor that could theoretically multitask was the 80286 released in 1982. There were some issues with the implementation so the 286 actually couldn't multitask. In 1986, Intel resolved this issue with the 80386 microprocessor that could multitask. At this time, the dominant operating system used on PCs was the DOS operating system, and of course DOS does not support multitasking.

So in 1990, Micrsoft released the now infamous Windows 3.0. Unfortunately, it did not come with multitasking support. I suppose, Microsoft could argue that the 386 is still a relatively new microprocessor so very few personal computers had the capability to support multitasking.

In 1992, six years after the 386 was sold, Microsoft released Windows 3.1 yet again without multitasking support. In fact, it took Microsoft nine years to add support for multitasking with the release of Windows 95. While Microsoft and its customers herald the arrival of a new era in cutting-edge computing, I was wondering why it took 9 years to do what I could do by myself 5 years earlier (granted, it was a much streamed down version).

This incident was the first in a series of incidents that I have had with the way Microsoft works. Thus, it came as no surprise to me when Microsoft was tried and judged guilty of using its monopoly over operating systems to gain an unfair competitive advantage over other companies. In fact, the Microsoft style of operating has become so infamous that in tech circles we have given names to Microsoft's tactics. One of them is the so called, "Embrace and extend" tactic that Microsoft uses to toy with classic computing standards as well as international standards.

One example is that long before there was even a Microsoft or Windows, there were already standards for remote login, file and printer sharing across a computer network, even remote windowing (using the graphical desktop of a remote computer as if it were right in front of you). Yet, Microsoft decided for various reasons to totally reimplement these in a proprietary way. This created a barrier where, for nearly a decade, non Microsoft systems had a lot of difficulty sharing files and printers, login remotely nor do remote windowing. This Microsoft tactic is so well known that it even has its own Wikipedia page, titled "Embrace, extend and extinguish".

In case you think that Microsoft has changed its ways after being judged guilty, think again. Despite Microsoft Internet Explorer's leading position as the most used web browser, it is still one of the least standards compliant and Microsoft has no intention of changing that. Even worse are the recent stunts Microsoft has pulled in order to get its Open Office XML or OOXML standard fast-tracked by the International Standards Organization (ISO). Granted there is currently no substantial evidence, but there were enough anomalies to suspect foul play.

What About Linux?

Suffice to say, I figured it is time to switch to another product that does more for me as a customer. Over the past two years, I have installed and looked at several options, including Open SUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora Red Hat. They each had the features I was looking for, standards compliant, availability of software that I need (especially good if there's an open source version), large userbase (to ensure longevity as well as support), compatible with Unix (this is a work related criteria). However, they all lacked one thing, usability. I have to say, simply having a windowed graphical user interface does not guarantee a usable interface. The open source community really needs to rethink how their applications are designed for end-users.

Having eliminated all other popular operating systems, I was left with one choice I hadn't looked at in a while, Mac OS X. In the next article, I will explain why I finally settled on the spotted cat as my operating system of choice.