Brian Jepson’s Weblog

BoingBoing: Government
info APIs from Rhode Island

Boston
Herald: “The Pixies have just been added to the lineup of the
Dunkin’ Donuts Newport Folk Festival.” (er… if you’re wondering
about the whole Rhode Island/Dunkin’ Donuts thing… well, it is what it
is. Just have a donut with me and clam up.)

I am a freak magnet. The sooner I come to terms with that, the
better-adjusted I will be. One of the guys ranting at me was pretty
crazy, and kept going on about how he wanted to personally hunt down and
kill bin Laden. Going on and on about it, over and over again–by the
fifth time he said it, I was wondering, did he think
I didn’t understand him? I have a feeling that if I was a more
frequent bus rider, I would realize that sort of thing is a bus
cliche.

Funny, I used to ride the bus all the time–in and around South
Kingstown, from South Kingstown to Providence, from Providence to
Pawtucket (and back of course). I used to groove with the weirdness.
Back then (years ago), the only thing that bothered me was when the guy
three seats ahead of me (yes, the buses here have sparse ridership)
turned around and said “I hope you have your boots on”, and then
proceeded to piss on the floor. I was a freak magnet then, I’m a freak
magnet now.

I turned on my hotel’s TV set today, and it started feeding me promos
for the usual movies and pr0n offerings, but it was also promoting the
N64 that is built into the TV, or more likely, sitting in a closet
somewhere.

They showed some box art, pictures of Mario and Donkey Kong, and played
some gaming sound effects. One of the sound effects was very crude, and
I couldn’t place it at first, but I was sure it wasn’t from an N64
game.

Then it hit me–it was the awful noise that Atari 2600 Pac-Man makes
when you start a game.

Someone has a sick sense of humor

• $500M in third-party products sold over past 12 months.
• Showing a video that Apple uses to pitch people on new store
  locations
  • One of the worl’s fastest growing retail chains
• iPod Update
  • 76% market share
  • 430,000,000 songs sold and downloaded to date.
  • Podcasting is exploding “TiVO for radio”/”Wayne’s World for Radio”
    (time shifting+anyone can be a broadcaster) (seems clear that Apple
    wants to assert some kind of ownership of podcasting–the name really
    helps)
    
  • iTunes will have a built-in podcast directory
• Mac Update
  • Mac has beaten PC growth rate in Q105 (YoY growth of Macs 3x that
    of PCs)

  • Shipped 2 millionth copy of Tiger this week (counting retail,
    maintenance, and new Macs), 16% of the entire Mac OS X user base (Panther is
    50%, Jaguar is 25%)

  • Next release will be called Leopard Late 06, early 07
• Transitions
  • Two major transitions: 68x to PPC; OS9 to OS X
  • It’s true: going from PowerPC to Intel (2006-2007)
  • Why?
    • Power consumption; performance unit per watt.
    • PPC gives us 15/watt
    • Intel gives us 70/watt
  • Two challenges
    • Getting Mac OS X to be happy on Intel
      • “Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life”
      • zoomed in on the map showing the secret building
      • “Every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for both PowerPC and Intel . This has been going on for the last five years”
      • has been using an Intel system for the whole keynote (3.6GHZ Intel Pentium)
      • He’s demoing stuff; it’s really fast, especially iPhoto (audible gasps from audience)
    • Your Apps
      • Cocoa: a few days to port
      • Carbon: a few weeks to port
      • Metrowerks: move to Xcode
  • New Xcode today: Xcode 2.1
    • Choose your architecture at compile-time
    • Fat binaries are back
  • Case Study
    • Gave Wolfram 5 days heads-up to port everything to Intel.
    • Took two hours to port Mathematica
    • 20 lines of code
  • Rosetta
    • Existing Power PC Apps run directly on Intel
    • Totally transparent
    • Lightweight
    • Pretty fast
    • He demoed Word, Excel, Photoshop, and they worked just fine
  • Developer Transition Kit
    • 3.6GHz Pentium 4
    • OS X 10.4.1
    • Xcode 2.1
    • Docs
    • $999 (have to return them at end of 2006)
    • For select and premier members
  • Parade of People to Talk About How Cool this Is
    • Roz Ho, General Manager of the Mac BU
    • Bruce Chizen, CEO Adobe
    • Paul Otellini, Intel President and CEO