Bader’s Bits

That’s how this article on the latest legal and business trevails of the record labels begins. They just can’t seem to get a break. Even now that they’ve gotten hip to online distribution and sold over 1 billion tracks through iTunes, there’s another prosecutor exploring price fixing charges.

And now that Steve Jobs and Apple got their way by keeping the flat $.99 per track pricing, the record companies have lost online pricing power.

I don’t mean to gloat, nor do I think Apple and iTunes are perfect, but it’s nice to see how market and legal forces can affect even the most arrogant companies.

How’s that for a five year summary of Apple’s future? You’ll be able to say you read it here first.

Hear me out. With the recent management changes at Apple the time is right to move OS X off of its old BSD core and onto Linux. In doing so, all Linux and open source application developers are now in essence writing for Apple’s platform. The distraction of KDE vs. Gnome goes away: OS X and Aqua become the desktop and UI for Linux.

Next, Apple takes Boot Camp to its logical conclusion: virtualizing the hardware and allowing any OS to run. That will make Apple’s hardware the most versatile in the industry. Amongst others, enterprises would embrace it because with one vendor, they’ll be able to run any desktop environment. Big market share growth. Sweet.

To frost that cake, Apple and Intel work together to exploit multiprocessing and multi-core CPUs, and really demonstrate that Vista is the end of the line. With Intel now struggling for direction, and fantasizing they can succeed in consumer marketing, a great solution would be for Apple to start setting Intel’s strategic direction and eventually subsume them. By then Dell will be all over AMD as they chase lower costs. Apple is the only company that can save Intel long term.

So the real frosting on the cake is combining Disney, Apple and Intel. It is what Sony had hoped to become. Whether this becomes one corporate entity or just Steve Jobs’ fiefdom, it would absolutely rule in cool. I just hope that as the empire grows that Jobs is more beneficient than Gates: open it all up a bit and make us consumers happier.
Let me know what you think. And remember, when all this comes to pass, you read it here first.

Robert Iger, the new CEO of Disney, said that the lessons of the music industry screwing up convinced him to offer select ABC TV shows online for free. What a concept! The shows include embedded ads that can’t be skipped (we’ll see how long that lasts).

On the one hand, what’s he got to lose? Everyone is able to watch these shows for free already, so the risk of cannabalizing ABC’s revenues are not as obvious as they are in the music industry. On the other hand, if I were a network affliliate station, suddenly I’ve got another competitor, and so far there’s no room for local ads on the downloaded shows (the ads are different than the ones included in broadcast).

Regardless, those are his problems. Suddenly, though, the obvious has happened: Hollywood’s precious content is now being distributed for free on the Internet. To Robert’s credit he’s doing what his customers are asking for. And other content is bound to follow. How long will it be until we no longer need cable service to get our TV fix? Things are starting to get interesting…

While on vacation this week in North Carolina, I had the pleasure of joining my son Derek (he’s on the right) in one of his classes taught by the legendary Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man Month. So many stories, so little time. Fred has made many contributions to computing, including defining a byte with eight bits (up until then, a word was six bits). Both he and Gene Amdahl argued the issue, and each quit IBM once over the matter, only to rejoin the next day and remain lifelong friends.

The session was great trip down memory lane, as the next generation of computer scientists gleamed insights from us codgers about how to manage their upcoming careers. The best part: I not only don’t embarrass Derek much anymore, but he was willing to trot me out in public. It only took 35 years. I guess there’s still hope for my sixteen year old daughter and me. Just 19 more years to go!

Yeah, it’s cool, no question. OK, it might not be legal (IANAL). But, it’s really cool, and that’s what matters, right? I’m talking about running Apple’s OS X on my PC at home. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Let’s just say that you found a copy of OS X out in the wild. It’s out there, I’ve heard on Bit Torrent and other file sharing networks. It’s probably already hacked by the latest legend, Maxxuss, who has singlehandedly disabled Apple’s attempt to lock the OS to Apple hardware. Burn the image to a DVD, drop a blank hard drive in your machine and you’re ready to give it a shot.

Whether it works or not is a matter of luck and drivers. If you’re hardware matches the supported profiles, you’re in business. In my hypothetical case, everything worked at first except sound and my network card. Consulting the OSX86project website, I discovered an Intel NIC I had is on the “supported hardware” list. Ten minutes later, I was hypothetically on the ‘Net, with Safari browsing away. Bottom line: if you want to try this at home, save some aggrevation by getting some hardware that’s supported.

It runs nice and fast. It’s solid. It’s pretty. There’s a bunch of software that runs on it. But you know what? After getting it running, I pulled the drive and went back to Windows and Linux. Maybe I’ll get back to it. But what I’m really focused on is running more apps on my servers, and on the ‘Net. I want my client machines to be not much more than an Internet connection and a browser. So I may get back to it someday, but OS X on Intel may be too little, too late for me.