| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
|
Sun 20 Feb 2005 Infinite LoopCategory : Commentary/infiniteloop.txt I've just finished reading Michael Malone's "Infinite Loop". I'm wondering about how people like Malone and Jim Carlton could write their books with so much bile. "For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new." - Niccolo Machiavelli - (that was the passage that came to mind) - from The Prince. Actually, if you've ever run your own company, you might take a little more sympathetic view of much of the same events described by Malone in his book. In the twenty years that went by, most of the companies Malone extolled for their virtues, as much for their contrast to Apple - DEC, Compaq, even IBM's PC business - they're all dead and gone. Or languishing (HP, Sun). And we're still using Macs. Here's a guy who seems to have a desperate need to be the one who declares the winners and the losers. Like God. Like I could imagine, on Judgment Day, Malone snucking a seat next to God so he could make the pronouncements - hero here, shit-head there. It's an interesting read (for other reasons), so long as I don't have to pay for it and send money his way (I borrowed it from our wonderful library). The lesson for the entrepreneur or the innovator - build it and they won't necessarily be allowed to come. Watch for the gatekeepers and opinion formers. (I'm tempted to add, parasites all.) Make sure you have a lot more iron in the soul. It's going to be a long haul. Will we get an Apple Store?Category : Commentary/applestorequestion.txt Will we see an Apple Store (a physical one, that is) in Singapore? I was at that AppleCentre at Wheelock, above the Borders book store, during lunch. It's right next to the sushi joint, where my wife likes to take the kid, and I think you can get a feel for how well the Mac market is doing from watching the size of the crowd. By a lot of accounts, this place isn't synonymous with good or pleasant service, but still, the crowd's pretty big. Huge, actually. So, I think an Apple Store in Singapore will do very well. Note that this is only conjecture. I don't have too many friends in Apple's sales team and I'm definitely not privy to any plans. But to me, it's a no-brainer. What are they waiting for? USB Flash Drives & The Little Mac Shop That CouldCategory : Technology/USBFlashDrives.txt I bought a couple of USB Flash Drives yesterday from a Mac shop called SGL Marketing at Sim Lim Square. It's a little, hole-in-the-wall, almost impossible-to-find niche near the overhead bridge between Sim Lim Square and Albert Complex across the road. But Mac users in the know will make our way there because you get the best deals and the most pleasant Mac-like service. I actually bought one 1 GB drive first but I found it was slow and, at that rate, I'll never be able to fill it up. So S. G. Lee allowed me to swap it (even though I've already tried it) for two 512 MB versions, which turned out to be cheaper, and she surprisingly returned me the difference with a smile. (Now where else would you get that? At that AppleCentre at Wheelock? Don't make me laugh). Don't let that dingy, worn carpeting fool you. They're the real class act. I'm really behind the curve with USB thumb drives. I realised that it's great for copying over the course materials quickly when people turn up for our courses. I believe that a very high percentage of the attendees actually own iBooks or PowerBooks. So it's possible to see the day when we don't have to set up the lab machines. Everybody will bring their own. Also, while copying over stuff to the thumb drives, I kept getting errors and I realised that application bundles couldn't be copied over. So something must be wrong. That's when I found that you can re-format the drives to OS X Extended format (they were originally in the old OS 9 Mac-PC Exchange format, I think). After that, things speeded up a lot and the copying errors went away. So the 1 gig drive should have worked well, after all. |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
