journals

Apple sells movies--sorta [UPDATED TWICE AGAIN]

By Nick, March 14, 2006

It looks like the rumors got this right, kinda. Movies are available for download on iTunes, sotra. Now available on iTunes, “High School Musical” (iTunes link), a touching story about a jock and a brain who both enjoy singing and break down stereotypes. Beautiful. Powerful. Made-for-TV. It runs for $1.99, the same as other iTMS videos, [UPDATE: It looks like Apple upped the price to $9.99.] and is a 487 MB download.

Rumors have been floating around for a while about Apple moving into offering full-length movies on iTunes, though it’s hard to tell whether this is simply an extension of offering TV shows (it is a made-for-TV movie, as mentioned before), or if you really will be able to download Dude, Where’s My Car? someday in the near future.

UPDATE: Changed “brian” to “brain.” I hope nobody got the wrong impression… -ed.

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No Vista for Macintels

By Pilky, March 10, 2006

Microsoft has announced that it will not support EFI in the first versions of Windows Vista, due out at the end of this year. The first version of Windows that will support it will be the first version of Longhorn Server. EFI may find it’s way into a later version of Vista but it will never work on the 32 bit version, ruling out the new Macintels. And Microsoft’s reason for not supporting EFI? A lack of support for it from hardware manufacturers.

Deep Thought’s take: Microsoft killing off features from Vista? Normally we’d joke about it but this is a huge loss to Mac users. Microsoft’s reasoning also sucks. Who is going to support EFI in new machines if the OS they use doesn’t support it. If Microsoft added EFI support to Vista from the get go then the hardware manufacturers would be able to support it.

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Google Earth for Windows

By Liam, March 9, 2006

Until very recently, a PC user’s favorite time waster was held in the infamous “Google beta” stage. A few days ago, two things changed. One, it was no longer in Google beta, and two, it was no longer only just for PC users. That time waster is Google Earth.

Google Earth starts out with a view of North America. At first glance, this may seem like a 3D model of the Earth. Zooming in will show you the actual purpose of this application. Google Earth is a satellite map application. It contains many of the features of online map services, such as directions, as well as an array of features that haven’t yet appeared in online services, such as touring.

Using Google Earth

When you start Google Earth, you’ll usually want to fly to a particular location (if you know the address), search for a business (If you know the type and the area), or get directions.

Search

Fly To

The first of Google Earth’s search functions is Fly To. Fly To is essentially a search engine for every address and business that Google Earth knows about. Fly To works best if you know the address or specific name of the place you’d like to see. Once you input your search terms, Google Earth will search through its database, and then go to the results. If you get only one match, Google Earth will head directly to the placemark, otherwise the view will zoom out to include all placemarks. All searches…
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News of the Weird: Alexa.com hacked? [UPDATED: Nope!]

By Nick, March 7, 2006

Visitors to Alexa.com might have noticed something odd Tuesday night:

See that? No, not Deep Thought’s traffic ranking (We’re 377,191! We’re 377,191!); below that. “See other sites owned.” (View full screenshot)

Yes, I blurred out the URLs, due to their, ahem, inappropriate nature and I’m not in the mood to field complaints from angry mothers who found their little Johnny surfing pr0n sites after finding the URLs here.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say someone broke into Alexa’s servers, and instead of doing a drastic defacement of the site, stuck something in the sidebar bragging about their exploits. If anything, I must admire the hax0r’s appreciation for subtlety!

For what it’s worth, a quick look at Netcraft’s data on Alexa indicates the stie is running on Linux servers.

Newsworthy? Not really. News-of-the-weird-worthy? Definitely.

UPDATE: Reader Dan Ridley clears things up:

That’s supposed to show you other sites owned by the owner of the same URL you’re currently dealing with. So if you look up a9.com, you see that they own opensearch.org; or if you look up apple.com, you see that they own mac.com.
A whois lookup for dtgeeks.com says it’s owned by the RegisterNow Whois Protection Service, so Alexa is lumping you in with others who don’t want it to be known what sites they’re running.

That’s what happens when the term “owned” is used in geek circles for something completely different!

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Five Reasons Why There WILL Be Macs in 2010

By Pilky, March 7, 2006

If there has ever been a more compelling argument for the all-in-one hardware and software system working the iPod and iTunes are it.

It’s hard to tell whether Chris Seibold is serious or very bad at comedy but he has managed to post a Dvorak-esque article entitled “Five Reasons Why There Will Be No Macs in 2010”. Well I am here to present a nice counter argument to that. The era of the all-in-one hardware and software solution is here and alive now and this is why Apple is smart enough to stick with it:

1. Leopard

We don’t yet know the details of this mysterious release but it is safe to say that Apple is taking notice of Vista and planning accordingly. We can guess at three key features/improvements: resolution independent UI, improved Spotlight searching and an improved Finder. The first two are are fairly easy to guess at. The basis for resolution independent UIs is already in Tiger (granted it isn’t enabled) and looking at the way Apple is going with its hardware (higher resolution screens) it’s easy to see why they would want to look at implementing this. Spotlight is obviously a starting point and it would be a HUGE surprise if we didn’t see an improvement in meta data handling in Leopard. The improved Finder is based just on the job opening for a Finder developer but seeing as Leopard is still almost year away we could see it feature.

These show that Apple is looking at how it can match Vista and outperform it. Apple isn’t prepared to drop the ball. And don’t expect Apple to have taken these…
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