Month: January 2005

Steve’s magic touch

MS vs. Apple in the stock market:

Extrapolating from Apple’s form in the last quarter they are on a pace to do a gross of about $16 billion this year. Microsoft, which own 96% of the desktop market or so, made $36.8 billion last year.

So Apple is grossing almost 1/2 as much as Microsoft with a much smaller percentage of the desktop market. Is that perhaps due to selling hardware rather than software? There are associated costs to this of course which make selling software much more desirable but it seems that Apple has been growing dramatically in the last couple of years in total sales volume.

And of course, software products were also on the MacWorld agenda: iLife 05 and Pages, the second piece of the office software puzzle. I have to wonder why they’re not working with OpenOffice, but at the same time, it opens a second front. Open Source OS users and Windows users alike can use OpenOffice or KOffice or even individual apps (AbiWord and gnumeric) while Mac users are offered Pages and Keynote (where is the Excel replacement?). I doubt it will make much of a dent in MSFT’s revenue stream, but it may be more than a mere distraction.

Now playing: She Said by Brie Larson from the album “iTunes New Music Sampler (Universal Motown Edition)”

the peripheral is the computer

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: After 20 Years, Finally Capitalizing on Cool:

Consider some competitors. Microsoft has a near-monopoly on the basic software used on the hardware owned by most people, enabling the company to extract what is basically a head tax. Google has a near-monopoly in the digital library business, which enables it to do very well with advertising that monetizes eyeballs. But Apple has an absolute monopoly on the asset that is the most difficult for competitors to copy: cool.

Paul Saffo, research director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., says emphatically, “Hipness is the only asset that matters.” Mr. Jobs had not been able to leverage it in traditional computers because technology in crucial areas had not matured enough to make cool affordably practical on a mass scale. To the extent that cool is based on exclusion of the uncool, Apple was too hip for its own long-term health.

With the introduction of the iPod in 2001, however, Mr. Jobs offered a product that combined cool with inexpensive, truly personal computing that fits in a pocket. Thanks to technological progress, Mr. Jobs now has at his disposal ridiculously cheap processing and memory, which render meaningless the distinction between computer and peripheral. To paraphrase Sun Microsystems, the peripheral is the computer.

Moore’s law helps Apple’s industrial design and user-focused software deliver on its initial promise.

The iPod does a very few things but does them well. The Mini is an extension of that: it’s not a complete computer, but a slot-in replacement for something else.

Now playing: Badge by Cream from the album “20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection: The Best of Cream”

recipe: naan

for your saag paneer or other Indian dishes

Naan
2 cups unbleached white flour (replace with up to 2/3 cup of whole wheat if you like)
3/4 cup soured milk or yogurt
1 tsp yeast
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp water

If you’re not using yogurt, sour the milk with 1 tbsp vinegar or lemon juice. Let stand 5-10 minutes.
Add the flour and yeast to the bowl of your stand mixer.
Add the milk/yogurt.
Mix together with a hook, then add the salt when everything is moistened and mixed together. Add the water as needed.
Mix at medium speed until the dough is smooth and not too sticky. It should all pull away from the sides of the bowl and be kneaded together.
Lift it and put the dough in an oiled or buttered bowl, allowing room for it to double. Cover with plastic wrap.
Put it in the (cool) oven or in some place (a sunny windowsill) to rise.
In an hour or two it will have risen to double in size.
Preheat the oven to 450F.
Remove it from the bowl and put it on a floured countertop.
Divide the dough into 8 equal piece and roll them into balls.
Cover them with a dish towel for 10 minutes.
Roll each piece into an 8-10 inch circle, dust with flour and put aside: be careful not to stack them without flour, or they’ll stick.
When you have 4 rolled out, lay them on a baking sheet and put them in the over: set the timer for 5 minutes.
Roll the others out.
Check the first batch: if they have puffed up and are browning just slightly, they’re done.
Pull them out and put them on a rack to cool.
Put the others in to bake the same way.
To serve, cut them in half and put them in a basket or add to plates when serving. Some like to brush them with butter when they come out of the oven: personal preference.

recipe: saag paneer

A popular Indian dish, consisting mostly of homemade cheese and spinach. Serve with rice or a rice and pea pilau, and naan/pita bread or chapatis if you have them.

Paneer (the cheese):
48 – 64 oz milk
1/4 cup vinegar

Heat the milk to just short of boiling (when bubbles form around the edge of the pot): as it comes to boil, add the vinegar (lemon juice works as well, but it adds a lemony flavor that may not work for you). Turn off the heat, and let the milk separate: you should have a green-yellow liquid with fluffy white chunks floating around in it (whey and curds, respectively).

Once it’s separated, strain it through a cheesecloth in a colander or strainer: keep the whey if you have a use for it, but I never do. Fold the cheesecloth over the curds, put a plate over it, and add some weight (a jar or pan of water is fine). You want the curds to drain but not be pressed too hard. If you do it the day before, you can skip the weight and just hang the whole mess up over the sink to drain.

Open the cheesecloth, dice the paneer (not to small: 1 inch is fine), and put aside.

Saag (seasoned spinach):
2 10 oz boxes of frozen spinach or 1 lb fresh
1 tbsp olive oil
garam masala
salt

Cook the spinach if frozen: I just do it in the microwave. If you have fresh, just add it a medium-high pan and wilt it, then put it aside.

Add the oil to your skillet, and fry the cubed paneer until brown, then put aside. Season it with garam masala and salt.

Add the cooked spinach to your skillet, and heat it up for a minute or so, then add the paneer, and cook them together, covered for 5 minutes.

Uncover, stir it around, making sure everything is heated through, serve with rice or pilau.

I expect better from the Economist

Economist.com | Apple Computer:

Even though the iPod now outsells Apple’s computers by volume, most of the firm’s revenues still come from the computers—the iMac desktop, the iBook laptop and the high-end Power Mac and PowerBook. So Mr Jobs still needs to fix Apple’s longstanding problem in its core business, which is that its global market share in computers seems stuck at about 3%.

Marketshare

Well, lookee there: Porsche, never considered a doomed company, barely uses any ink on this chart, while BMW seems right around 3-4%. Know anyone who frets about BMW going away?

The idea that Apple is a a failure unless it dethrones MSFT says more about reporters’ feelings about the companies — and their founders — than about the market in which they operate.

The article goes on to accurately assess the niche Apple’s mini was designed to fill:

Cutting the price tag of the new box by leaving out the peripherals rather than by stripping down its functionality is a shrewd way of minimising two risks. It is unlikely to cannibalise sales and profit margins of Apple’s more expensive models; and it is likely to snap many Windows users out of their inertia and into making the switch. As more of them do, Mr Jobs reckons, the converts will tell other Windows users how safe Macs are (compared to Microsoft’s buggy, virus-prone software) and how user-friendly (just try networking several Macs together, compared to several Windows machines).

So on balance, they got more right than wrong, but it would be nice to read an article that didn’t expose the reporter’s frustrations, but laid out the facts.

I hate Comcast: intermittent outages likely

They dropped my service twice yesterday and so far once today.

For some reason, traffic just stops flowing and nothing short of rebooting both the cable modem and the server will resolve it. The cable modem seems unable to re-establish the flow of bits to the external interface and using dhclient(8) to try dropping and requesting networking configuration information seems to fail.

Time to look into DSL, perhaps.

<update @ 2240> I hate Comcast even more. Service just went out again.

Customer Care sez they’ll swap me a new modem if I bring this one in. After four years, I suppose it’s likely to be past it’s sell-by date. DSL is still a possibility, if I can get a good deal. Speakeasy, beloved as they are, cost even more than Comcast and I’ll never be able to sell a more expensive service to the Powers That Be.

apache2 — again

a crank’s progress:

now with Apache2

I tried this before — I didn’t realize how long ago — and in my quest for performance (newer versions are rarely the way to go, though), I decided to try this again.

A lot of fumbling around with all the php innards that need to be (re)installed. Seems to work OK now . . .

Now playing: If I Wasn’t Shy by They Might Be Giants from the album “Apollo 18”