Archive for the ‘history’ tag
The Beatles are on iTunes. Sosumi!
Yesterday Apple announced that the long time iTunes holdout, The Beatles, would finally be making their way to the iTunes Music Store. In a decade where file sharing addresses availability when the market won’t, the news is almost more novel for its, “Who still needs to buy this?” factor than anything else.
The most compelling reason to acquire Beatles music through iTunes would be for the direct masters-to-digital conversion. It’s a “purer” copy than ripping from a CD. As to whether or not repurchasing your Beatles collection is worthwhile for such a change, who can say? The laser turntable owners of the world probably think so.
The other story behind this is the interesting relationship between Apple Records and Apple Computers. In 1981, Apple Records made Apple Computers promise that they’d never get into the music business after a lawsuit over the company name. Several years later Apple introduced MIDI and audio recording capability to its IIGS line. Apple Records sued again, and the resulting decision effectively squashed Apple’s multimedia development for the next couple of years.
Frustrations over the legal battle, and its limitations placed on Apple Computers, led to the following anecdote from 1991:
When new sounds for System 7 were created, the sounds were reviewed through Apple’s legal department and they objected that the new system sound alert “chime” had a name that was “too musical”, under the recent settlement. The creator of the new sound alerts for System 7 and the Macintosh Startup Sound, Jim Reekes, had grown frustrated with the legal scrutiny and first quipped it should be named “Let It Beep”, a pun on The Beatles’ “Let It Be”. When someone remarked that that wouldn’t pass legal’s approval, he remarked “so sue me.” After a brief reflection, he resubmitted the sound’s name as sosumi (a homophone of “so sue me”), telling the legal department that the name was Japanese and had nothing to do with music.
The Sosumi sound effect is still included with Snow Leopard, and is right up there with Clarus the Dogcow for favorite Apple lore among us cultists. 
On Being Connected
Outside My Hotel in Malaysia – Do Not Feed The Monkeys!
I know the last time I posted here I said I’d be following up with another technical post, but instead I thought I’d share an experience I just had as I took a last minute trip for a client.
Normally if I take a trip it’s no big deal. I can write a blog post from where ever I go. My email is online, this blog is online, if I need to access something in my office I can just use our VPN to get connected. To use any of these I’d just need to have an Internet connection. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case when last week I went to a fairly remote part of Malaysia.
A few coworkers and I were trying to make last minute adjustments to a product that one of our clients is launching. At first I wondered why even send us out there when we can get remote access or talk someone through it on the phone. When I arrived onsite I realized why this wasn’t an option — getting connected is near impossible there. We could head to a coffee shop and get some free WiFi, but with over twenty hops to servers in the United States and a twelve hour time difference, getting anything done was difficult.
The lack of connectivity was challenging. One of my responsibilities was interfacing with the local IT department and writing some scripts to integrate the client’s system with existing systems and processes. I quickly realized how much I depend on online references and documentation. When you can barely get connected to look up the answer to a question about syntax you really have to use your head. Not to mention, each software build for the project is about 300 megabytes and getting this from our office in New York was difficult and time consuming.
The idea of ubiquitous Internet connectivity is something that we take for granted. As connection speeds get faster and more reliable we lose efficiencies that we once had. I learned that the Internet is really an extension of my knowledge and a valuable tool that I need to do my job. Being cut off from it was an interesting and overall positive experience. Solving every problem by thinking and working it through was difficult and took more time, but genuinely figuring things out for myself was very rewarding.
Towards the end of my time there we found a cell phone store that sold GSM modems and prepaid 3G SIM cards that allowed us to get connectivity. While this does make the job a lot easier, I’m glad I had the experience of being mostly cut off from the rest of the net — something that will surely happen less often as the world becomes better connected.
In The Beginning, There Was Just One Web Browser…
In the beginning, there was just one web browser… and it was good. Mainly because there wasn’t another web browser to be “the bad one”.
Written for NeXTStep by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, WorldWideWeb was the first of many browsers to offer up their view of how web pages should be rendered for the end user. Although the world wide web is based on open standards that are interoperable by anyone, the browser community became a near monoculture during the mid to late 90s thanks to Microsoft’s inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows. Even Mac OS X users were ensnared by Internet Explorer as it was not only the first browser for the then-new OS, but one of the very first 3rd-party applications as well.
Then, in 2003, Firefox (then called Phoenix) showed up on the scene. Although other web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Opera Software’s Opera had established user bases, it was Firefox that captured the hearts of the alpha geeks by way of its altruistic goal to create a good open source web browser. No longer was browser functionality beholden to the whims of its parent corporation. Now the end user was king.
Initially this freedom brought a flurry of innovation in browser design. Things like tabbed windows, download managers, and an interface add-on architecture were created or borrowed to make Firefox a more useful browser. Companies such as Apple saw value in the open source browser effort and joined or started open source projects of their own. Soon the idea of a modern browser became so powerful that even Microsoft updated Internet Explorer to include these improvements.
As the browser grew up, the Internet continued to diversify in use, and discovered along the way that one browser layout does not fit all. Although interface hacks gave Firefox specialized capabilities, people started to wonder whether or not it would make more sense to design a browser for a specific purpose from the interface up. Now came the rise of the specialized browser.
Google Chrome
Flock is probably the most well known of the specialized browser breed, which is to say that you’ve probably never heard of it unless you’re a geek or one of their unwitting testbed friends. Available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, Flock is built around interacting with social networking sites, webmail, blogs, and more. Friend lists for sites like Facebook are readily available in a browser sidebar. Posting a link on your blog is as easy as bringing up special text edit panel without leaving the site you’re on. Overall the goal is to abstract services from their respective websites to make them more tool-like.
Some specialized browsers are reductions rather than additions. Google turned a lot of heads when they released Chrome, a web browser with a uniquely minimal interface. While the “get the browser out of the way” interface was warmly embraced by alpha geeks, the hoovering of personal web activity by Google through Chrome was not.
Enter Iron. Since Chrome is run by Google as an open source project, enterprising programmers took the Chrome source code and removed all the components that transmitted personal data to the Google mothership. The browser retains the look and functionality of Chrome while respecting the user’s privacy.
The Ghostzilla Browser
Other specialized browsers serve more subversive purposes. Based on the Gecko rendering engine, the now discontinued Ghostzilla allowed sneaky office users a chance to peek at the Internet without raising the suspicions of their over-the-shoulder glancing managers. Rather than display content in a traditional browser window, Ghostzilla masked its purpose by running inside the window space of a traditional Office app such as Microsoft Word. Web pages were rendered in black and white and images were not loaded unless moused over. The entire browser space itself disappeared when the mouse was moved away, making covering your tracks as simple as a gesture.
The specialization of web browsers shows that the world wide web is evolving in a way that is healthy and intended. Although he could have used closed, secretive code to instruct web browsers on how to display web pages, Sir Tim Berners-Lee chose to employ an open human-readable language called HTML. This even playing field has fostered a level of communication that is unprecedented in human history. Let the good times download.