There’s been a lot of overreaction in the press regarding the latest iPhone firmware. Thankfully it’s beginning to die down as reporters are realizing they’re standing up for hackers and unlockers, and people who generally aren’t interested in supporting the corporate interests of their sponsors, but I digress. Lots of articles were published slamming Apple for “bricking” iPhones that have been modified. The reality of the situation is quite different. Apple issued a press release announcing their concerns about third party SIM unlocks; they created unmanageable incompatibilities and issues with the firmware upgrade process.

So I got an iPhone last week, after having read enough reports of successful unlocks and an increasingly long list of custom applications. I saw one in person for the first time just prior, and was basically sold. My current smartphone is an HTC Mogul, known in Canada as the P4000 from Telus. I evaluated the uses I put it to and set my criteria for the iPhone as simply as follows: Can I get it to do the same things?

Great review here from Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. An unbiased look at some of the things techies don’t mind doing, but your average user would find utterly stifling. Check this out.

One long-standing issue people have with QuickTime for Windows is its apparent insistence on becoming the default handler for video and images in IE and throughout the Windows environment, despite the setting of file associations to the contrary. Even if you set everything up to open in Windows Media, for some reason QuickTime is still invoked. This bothers a lot of people and is probably one of the reasons QuickTime for Windows is disliked.

“We choose Gentoo… not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to measure and organize the best of our energies and skillz, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and because of the pJE4R.” -- John F. Kennedy

UPDATE: I had originally titled this article “Home movies with Linux: Beginning the exploration (of things Linux can’t do)”, but have since changed the title to be a bit more fair. It is a given that Linux isn’t suited to certain tasks, but rather than show these things up as embarrassing shortcomings I’d much prefer to demonstrate these areas of weakness to people who strongly believe Linux should replace everyone’s Mac / PC tomorrow.

Continuing my recent theme of examining the true value of a computer system by basing the evaluation on more than just price, here are a couple of great articles which outline the limitations imposed on something as trivial as audiovisual playback in Windows Vista. Both are based on information from Peter Gutmann, a security researcher with the University of Auckland Department of Computer Science. A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection Vista Prevents Users Playing High-Def Content The gist?

11:30AM: Last question: “There has been a suggestion that Apple appeals to smaller elite than mass customer base. Is it your goal to overtake PC in marketshare?” Steve: “Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends. We want to do that at the lowest prices we can. “But there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship.

This HOWTO has been updated and dramatically streamlined! It’s worth re-reviewing if you’ve read/implemented this method already. Keep in mind, this is for experts/enthusiasts and not those looking for a quick one-click solution. The quality of video and sound is, for the average viewer, highly subjective. When it comes to viewing a DVD though, one can be certain that they’re watching the highest quality (until HD-DVD/Blu-Ray standardize) video they can get.

Great article here covering the technology media’s discussion of security on the Mac. It’s long been a peeve of mine that people claim *nix and the Mac by extension are insecure because they’re not widely deployed (this ignores the majority deployment of Apache webservers on *nix based systems, which the article doesn’t cover). The fact is that’s simply not realistic. The article rightly points out that UNIX based operating systems including MacOS X get nearly equal scrutiny to Windows from security experts, and that it’s in fact easier to examine the former because of its open source nature.