ITS News

Filed under: Industry

SimCity: “your city is experiencing brownouts, build another power plant”

The entire South of Market (SOMA) area of San Francisco is currently experiencing repeated power outages which began shortly before 2pm. This is the tech hub of SF, and a number of high-traffic websites are completely off the grid currently, including 365Main (a major colo), Craigslist, Netflix, Technorati, Yelp, and SixApart (Movable Type, Typepad, LiveJournal, Vox, etc).

InfoWorld’s building near South Park is currently down as well, but our website, hosted at Hosting.com, formerly Verio, on 3rd is still up and running as of 3pm.

Details on SFGate

Apparently 20,000+ in SF are currently without power. Glad I worked from home (San Mateo) today. =) Just hope the power comes back on before we have to start shutting down servers for heat reasons. And if you see InfoWorld drop off the ‘net you’ll know why….

Filed under: Apple, Mac OS X, iPhone

The resourcefulness of folks working on accessing the Unixy goodness of the iPhone is impressive. Working off of previous accomplishments, someone going by the name NerveGas has figured out a way of getting the SSH daemon working on the iPhone. This, combined with custom-compiled utilities, is really opening up the possibilities for customizing the iPhone going forward.

I’m a bit beyond my days of spending hours figuring out workarounds for restrictions, and I’ll most likely continue to use my iPhone as-is. But it’s heartening to see that the platform is being opened up for customization.

NerveGas’ Howto is located here.

More details at TUAW: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/23/ssh-on-iphone

Filed under: Apple, iPhone

Is Apple’s iPhone worth the price? Eric Hill and I discuss how the iPhone fares as a multimedia device, a corporate e-mail client, a PDA, geek bling, and, oh yes, a phone.

What geeks….

Filed under: iPhone

Is Apple’s iPhone worth the price? Eric Hill and I discuss how the iPhone fares as a multimedia device, a corporate e-mail client, a PDA, geek bling, and, oh yes, a phone.

What geeks….

Filed under: Apple, Mac OS X, iPhoneThe newly released iPhoneDrive (OS X only) from Ecamm Network, allows you to use your iPhone’s internal flash drive as file storage. While it doesn’t make the iPhone show up in Finder like a normal USB drive would, it does provide a quick and easy way to take files with you on the go.

Up until now, the only way to do this with the iPhone was to email the files to yourself. That method didn’t allow you to access the files from your Mac, so it was only useful for the limited number of file types that the iPhone can display natively.

Filed under: AppleApple has posted a detailed Guided Tour, which gives a nice overview of many of the iPhone’s features. This shows things which haven’t been publicized before, such as the Mail settings that are available, how YouTube works (hint: just like it does on AppleTV), and how to enable/disable airplane mode.

Another very cool new piece of information is that the iPhone will be able to display Word and Excel documents, not just the standard Text, PDF, etc.

Check it out:

Filed under: Apple, Industry, Mac OS X

I’m at WWDC all week, getting my dose of IT management for the Mac environment. Other than the keynote, the rest of the week is all NDA, so I won’t be able to post anything else. Other IW folks (Ephraim Schwartz and Tom Yager) will have more coverage for non-NDA interviews and discussions. Check out the InfoWorld WWDC 07 Special Report and Tom Yager’s Enterprise Mac blog for more coverage.

My thoughts on the keynote: Not a huge surprise. Apple fashions itself as primarily a hardware company, but one that happens to make great software. They’ve had a huge amount of success with iTunes on Windows, so bringing Safari to the Windows platform isn’t a big surprise. I think it will tie in nicely with the Safari integration on the iPhone, so that Windows web developers can build their AJAXified apps to target the iPhone more easily.

I was expecting something more about .Mac, honestly, beyond the connections between Macs through it. That is a cool sounding feature, which would help me support my family’s Macs and make it easier to access things that I have on my Mac Pro in the office while I’m mobile. But what I really want to see is Google handling the .Mac experience, tying in the various excellent Google apps with the slick .Mac integration.

I’m really wondering why they didn’t show off something like Google Reader from the iPhone. The basic RSS support that is built in to Safari can’t compare with GReader, and it would really bring home the zooming and flexibility that is built in to the iPhone.

Ah well - time to grab my Developer Preview of Leopard and clam up about things for the rest of the week. =)

Filed under: Mac OS X, Virtualization

As Mac excitement grows pre-WWDC, Parallels has released the full 3.0 version of their excellent virtualization software. We’ll have a full review up soon, but for now here are some highlights:

• SmartSelect - Allows for virtual OS apps to be set as the default type for a specific filetype. For instance, have Word for Windows open when you double-click a .doc file.
  
• Snapshots - Like the name says, it makes snapshots of your virtual environment, so that you can back out of changes (or busted Windows patches). This will also protect you from having to reinstall XP from scratch when you get infected.
  
• VM Sentry - Layer of protection between the real and virtual OS, keeping Windows issues from affecting your OS X environment
  
• Accelerated 3D - We’ll have to see how well this will handle newer 3D Windows games. This is one of the last issues that is keeping many users from moving to the Mac. 3D is also one of the few real reasons for using BootCamp to boot your Mac into XP directly.
  
• Parallels Explorer - Browse your Windows drive without firing up the full version of Parallels
  
• Other enhancements, such as Vista Boot Camp support, Transporter improvements, etc.
  

Filed under: Apple

Looks like the first gen iPhone has been approved by the FCC. Can’t wait for the second gen (hopefully with 3G) so it’ll be worth the cash and 2 year commitment to buy one. I’ll stick with my BlackBerry 8800 for now.

According to FCC documents obtained by AppleInsider, the “GSM Cellular Telephone with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi” carriers model number A1203 and FCC ID: BCGA1203.

In an SAR Test Report conducted on February 6th, 2006, FCC Test Lab Manager Lothar Schmidt wrote the following:

“The Apple Inc. A1203 GSM Cellular Telephone with Bluetooth and Wifi, FCC ID: BCGA1203, is in compliance with the limits for general population uncontrolled exposure specified in FCC 2.1093. The device was tested according to the measurement standards and procedures specified in FCC OET Bulletin 65, Supplement C (Edition 01-01) and IEEE p1528/D1.2, April 21, 2003.”

Copies of the actual FCC docs are also available on the Apple Insider page.

Filed under: Linux

It seems that Microsoft is stealing from SCO’s playbook in claiming Linux patent infringements, without actually backing up their claims with specific instances.

There should be some sort of penalties for making wide-ranging claims of patent infringement, without actually backing it up with specific instances. One thing that the Open Source community is good at is working around such issues. Microsoft doesn’t want to actually outline what they think infringes, since the community will just rewrite the various software to avoid the patents.

Over all, just another case of Microsoft FUD tactics.

For more InfoWorld coverage, see Open Sources and our Special Report page.