JohnTyra.com

Our good friends at Ars Technica have an article posted about the iTunes 8.0 launch which has now been ‘confirmed’ to be this Tuesday (Sept 9th). There are different features rumored to be included, yet another Ars Technica article, that range from Pandora-type functionality to HD content for TV shows.

That’s nice and all, but how about a all-you-can-eat subscription? I’ll be frank, the only reason I’m the owner of a Zune instead of an iPod is because ol Gates has a $14.99 (almost) all-you-can-download per month plan and senior Jobs does not. The Zune will probably be a great device some day with a lot of support, but let’s be serious: for any Zune accessory you find online or in a physical store, there are 100 iPhone accessories right next to it for half the price. Plus, after having problems with my third (yes, third) Zune from all of the replacements under warrenty, I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth it. I’ll be damned if I have to pay a buck per song, but a buffett subscription? Oh yes, I’ll come to the dark side for that, yes indeed….

Update: Maybe I’m not on crack after all! A lil’ Google lovin’ shows that a subscription based iTunes service has been rumored for well over a year. There is even a Wired article, link here, from just a week or so ago about said possibility. NICE!

Apple’s ads about the PC versus the Mac are pretty well known, viewable on Apple’s site and populated all over YouTube. I’m not an Apple ‘fanboy’ but I have to admit that their ads are funny as ever, and I don’t even own a Mac. These ads have gone unanswered by Microsoft for a long time, until now. That’s right, Microsoft has finally launched their ad campain with a well known comedian as their spokesperson. Who?

Jerry Seinfeld! So, these have to be funny and a great answer to the Apple ads, right? NO! This commercial, frankly, sucks. Check out the video for yourself on YouTube and tell me what you think. In my opinion, if they continue with this line of pointless ads then it’s a complete waste of their $10 million dollar investment to get Jerry Seinfeld for these commercials. What are your thoughts?

Apple’s famous iPhone has GPS, syncs your iTunes, connects at 3G speeds and will give away your personal data! Who wants one? The flaw allows anyone to access the personal data on the iPhone even if it is locked with a passcode.

What is required to bypass the security, according to Macworld: “hit the ‘emergency calls’ button, and then hit the Home button rapidly twice when they will be automatically transported to a users ‘Favorites’ folder (by default).” From here you can get to a user’s email, contacts and their web browser even though you have not entered the passcode. Apple is working on a patch, but until then there is a ‘fix’ that involves changing the home button to pull up something other than your favorites.

Over at Apple Insider there was a quick article about a three-alarm fire that went for about three hours Tuesday evening. According to the article, it started around 10PM and took over 60 firefighter personnel to extinguish the blaze.

Apple is not stating what was or was not damanged…no suprise there. Some are saying that the building (Valley Green Six) was used for R&D while others are saying it’s just an IT data center.

OH! There is also a link to a video from a local news station that covered the story.

The “Mojave Experiment” is part of Microsoft’s marketing campaign that is geared towards changing the preconceived notion that Vista is crap. Good luck! (They’ll need it!). Not a bad idea on their part, I must give credit, but it’s a bit too late in my opinion. Vista has been out for, what, almost two years now? Even if this marketing is successful, by the time it reaches full market saturation it’ll be time for the next new OS by Microsoft.

Ah, Microsoft — the lack of marketing (prior to this) surrounding Vista in conjunction with a lack of response to Apple’s ‘PC’ commercials have really given Vista a negative impression. The key word here is “impression”; there are so many people who have said “OMG Vista is crap” and have never used it. If someone actually tries something and does not like it, then hey, they don’t like it but they tried it and can form an opinion. On the other hand, how can someone form an opinion about something they have never tried? Answer: they can’t!

There are some blogs that are comparing this with the Milgram experiment…WOW! That’s a bit of a stretch: comparing Microsoft’s marketing campaign with a Yale psychological experiment that “measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure”. Are you serious? If Apple did this, it would be the next ‘big thing’ in marketing people for one OS over another, but with Microsoft it means they are just out of control. (Insert sarcasm here).

What do you think?

Did you mean, OpenGL? Well, no, my friend! We’re speaking about the new ‘Open Computing Language’ which, quoting PC World’s article:

lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications.

Apple is pushing for OpenCL to be the next open standard, following up from OpenGL/OpenGL ES, via the Khronos Group, which is the group that regulates standards in this industry.

Digging deeper into the article, it appears that this is not exactly ‘happy’ news for gamers. Instead of trying to get the computer and CPU to push faster frame rates and higher resolutions for games, this seems to only be beneficial to non-gaming tasks, such as encoding video or AutoCAD rendering. That’s ok, I suppose; using the graphics card to perform other tasks but it would be nice if it also helped out on gaming. That is the whole point of a graphics card, right Apple? For gaming?

Our good friends at Microsoft announced a reorganization for their PSD (Platform & Services Division) group that will effectively split them into two separate groups. One group to handle the Windows OS and another for Windows Live/Online Services.

Paul Thurrott will be pleased, as he has been talking about this very same thing for years, except that he was referring to a further level of separation: consumer versions of the Windows OS as a separate company versus the business versions, which actually makes sense. At the risk of duplicating what Paul has already said, there are very distinct differences between what a business needs and a consumer needs in terms of an operating system.

Let’s set aside the flame war between the anti-Microsoft and anti-Apple camps for a moment and just speak generically regarding this concept. For most of you home users, they are not going to need the ability to add their computer to a domain or push enterprise-level management policies to thousands of machines. On the other hand, your enterprise/business needs don’t usually include low-end movie editing or gaming. These groups are simply two very different animals, but the OS rarely reflects these differences.

Overall, let’s hope this is a step in the right direction regarding Microsoft’s future plans for the segration (and eventual fine tuning) of their different branches of influence. With each division focusing on a more grainular scope, they can push the product further without worrying about their changes affecting other divisions. It’s like the difference between using a shotgun to kill an ant versus simply stepping on it with your shoe; both are effective, but only one is efficient.

While Apple can’t compare to the sheer volume of other companies, they are growing. For example, everyone was excited that Apple sold over 1 million iPhones during their weekend launch. Nokia ships over 1 million phones every single business day. The numbers vary, but the same scale is true when comparing Apple to their software counterparts like Microsoft, or the OEMs like HP.

But, be small as they may, Apple does have around 200 or more stores globally. Their newest addition to this figure? Beijing, China! As is the typical norm with Apple events, there were people lined up overnight to be the ‘first in line’ at the new store. Haven’t these people heard of Apple.com? Anyway, not much to this story, but it is Apple’s first store in China so who knows what they are up to…

It’s been, what, not even a week since the 3G iPhone has been released? For those who have been considering using the 3G iPhone on other networks, consider no more…see the original blog who broke this story or the cNet story on this, but soon it’ll be all over the place (if it’s not already). Sure, it’s more Apple and iPhone news, but you have to admin it’s kinda funny. =)

Busy news day today, wow…so Apple says that they not only sold over 1 million iPhones during their first weekend of sales but that they also had over 10 million applications downloaded as well. Maybe that’s why there were so many stories about iPhone activation problems with AT&T and the iTunes store being down? Hmm, go figure. You know, if this was a Microsoft story, it’d be a bashfest for the average blogger, right?