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Don't mock me for iPhone lust

SAN FRANCISCO--The twenty-something woman trash-talking us is definitely no fan girl.

"They'll be selling these stupid phones on eBay in a year," she snarls as she stalks past the 25 of us lined up outside Apple's store here late Thursday evening.

She's wearing a sweatshirt from a college in the Midwest and toting a shopping bag so someone barks back: "tourist!" But she's not the only one who mocks us for camping out all night--braving this city's shivery summer air--for something as ho-hum as a cell phone. "Is it really … Read more

Going thin on Road Trip 2008 with the MacBook Air

SAN FRANCISCO--After working on an Apple MacBook Air for the last month while on Road Trip 2008, it was a real shock when I returned home and picked up my regular work MacBook Pro for the first time.

Compared to the Air, which I'd really gotten used to as I drove around the South, the Pro was really heavy. Shockingly so. And thinking back over the countless hours I spent with the Air in my backpack on my back as I visited endless places, I'm eternally grateful for all that weight I didn't have to carry.

And … Read more

.Mac migration to MobileMe hits some roadblocks

This post has been updated. See below.

The migration of Apple's .Mac service to the new MobileMe service apparently didn't go as smoothly as it could have.

The scheduled changeover of users' .Mac accounts to MobileMe, or .Me accounts, was scheduled for 6 p.m. to midnight PDT Wednesday. The migration was then pushed back to 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.

But Thursday at 11 a.m. PDT, neither service was accessible, at least to several people in San Francisco. Reader Deidre Wyeth also complained that .Mac account photos were inaccessible Thursday, and instead the site … Read more

Okay, okay, I'll get an iPhone 3G!

My very first meaningful blog post here (after an introduction), from June 23, 2007, was titled "Why I'm not getting an iPhone".

Let me review my reasons at the time:

The original iPhone couldn't really do any more for me than my Palm Treo 650. The iPhone couldn't be used to connect my laptop to the Internet. No voice-memo support. No 3G networking. Not enough storage capacity. No native apps from third-party developers. No high-res screen.

Okay, what's changed?

Well, the iPhone 3G still… Read more

Windows XP a hot item on Amazon

Although Microsoft officially stopped selling Windows XP as of June 30, retailers can keep selling it as long as they have copies.

Perhaps as a result of its potentially impending scarcity, XP is near the top of Amazon.com's software list, with the full version of XP Home at No. 15 and the full version of XP Pro at No. 21.

The highest ranked Vista edition doesn't crack the top 25, although it does come on nearly all new PCs these days so most people don't need a boxed copy.

For those keeping score, Apple's Mac … Read more

Stanford goes with Zimbra over Microsoft and Google

Is Zimbra enterprise-ready? Yes, it is.

At least, that's the news from Stanford, which today announced that it is replacing its campus-wide email system with Zimbra. TechCrunch outs the competition on the deal, too: Google's Gmail and Microsoft Exchange.

This is the latest in a series of victories for Zimbra, which includes Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, Texas A&M, Cal Poly, and University of Pennsylvania. Zimbra powers the email systems for over 300 universities worldwide. That comes in around an impressive 1.5 million email addresses ending in ".edu."

I use Zimbra on a … Read more

Introducing the Linux user interface

A few days ago, Walter Mossberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal, offered a verbal peek at the Mac user interface (see Some General Tips for Switch to Mac From Windows) intended as heads-up for Windows XP users thinking of switching.

I'm not a Mac user, but from reading the article, it seems that the initial learning curve for switching from Windows XP to Linux, is less than that for switching to Macs. Both Macs and Linux are immune to the vast majority of malicious software, so from a Defensive Computing standpoint, each is good choice.

One advantage Mac … Read more

My MacBook Air dies while Google Docs is offline

I've been a proponent of the Cloud and hosted applications for quite some time but today I am dramatically feeling the effects of having zero control over my infrastructure and the inability to get anything when a Cloud provider has issues.

My MacBook Air is clearly in it's death-throes just six months after purchase and today Google Docs was down for over an hour. I basically have no way to do any real work at this point as I can't use most of my applications and can't get to my documents on Google. I'm a … Read more

Shuttleworth: Desktop Linux can be better than the Mac

Mark Shuttleworth addresses a range of interesting things in a recent interview, but there are two, in particular, that strike me. First, Mark acknowledges the obvious: The Mac is a superior usability experience. Second, however, while placating his upstream developer communities, he also notes that improving on their work is going to be critical to beating the Mac:

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has historically been very, very deferential to what we call our upstream communities - GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the definition of the desktop experience. Our view, very strongly, is that they hold the real … Read more