Macking 96

They're Still Idiots
Just because Apple makes our favorite OS and really cool products, we should not forget that they are still a mega-corporation. They are required by both Murphy's Law and the Peter Principle to employ people in positions where their stupidity can make others point and laugh.
Example: Their wildly-successful iTunes Music Store. The '60s jazz album "Bitches Brew" by Miles Davis is available, but if you search on Miles Davis it isn't in the results list. If you search on the title, you get the album, the cover art, and all the tracks. In every case, it's spelled "B***hes Brew."
Now this is nuts. This is a title that can be printed in any "family" publication (including this one) without censorship; it may be advertised on television. What kind of nut is working at Apple, displacing a perfectly intelligent, reasonable person from holding that job?
I haven't tried searching for similar oddities, but found a few on the TidBITS discussion board. "Moby Dick" by Dread Zepplin returns a Moby D**k and just searching on obscene words brings up gangster c-rap as you would expect. You are all welcome to have some fun. I will print the most ludicrous in an upcoming issue if I get any. (Rap titles don't count.)
I can hear the plaintive whine of "protekkkkkt the chillllllun" in the distance. I am so sick of this ubiquitous demand to Disneify the Internet and everything else for the unquantifyable protection of some nebulous children somewhere. You can't buy from the iTunes store if under 18 and you also need a credit card, illegal for "minors."
In spite of these little stoopidities, the Apple music store is wildly successful but not a real change in music retailing. Of the 99 cents charged per track, the bulk of it goes to the rapacious top 5 record companies; the rest is kept by Apple and the artist gets whatever the record company feels like passing on: a tenth of a cent if they are lucky and have a well-written contract that specifies it.
Interesting, small independent artists who submit their own self-recorded tracks are still MIA, as are odd and unusual musicks from the days of yore: no Mary Hopkin (formerly on Apple Records), nothing of the two excellent albums from Scott McKenzie but the tedious hit "San Francisco (Flowers in Your Hair)" ; none of Stan Freberg's musical parodies, no copies of the excellent recent CD by Vienna Teng. At least they have Kate Bush, an '80s megastar in every country but the USA, but only her first two albums (she has more than nine). Apple, you got a LOT of work to do. I wanted to see some Happy Rhodes on there by the time this hit print (there wasn't).

iTunes Update - Avoid It
It may already be too late if you always say OK to Apple Software Updater, but the iTunes 4.0.1 update disables the playlist-sharing feature to your local network only. Before, you could stream the songs from your collection at home to your Mac at work (those of you lucky enough to HAVE Macs at work) without having to carry them all on a portable hard drive.
Because some people discovered that this gave them the power of a mini-Napster, Apple took this feature out, fearing an armed assault upon their offices by mercenaries hired by the RIAA.
If you saved your 4.0 iTunes installer, you can delete the updated version and reinstall. If you want to share your songs with a friend down the street or down the planet, that's your business.

iLoo
What an entertaining month it's been between issues of Bits. After the last deadline, but before this one, a series of news reports ran on Microsoft UK's proposal of the "iLoo," a portable potty with a keyboard, screen and wireless access. Web sites were to be printed on toilet paper based on ad sales.
Well, iSnorted and iLaughed because unless you have serious digestive issues you aren't going to be in there very long. Just time enough to read the inevitable adverts.
Everyone thought it was a hoax, including Microsoft USA. Imagine their embarrassment when they discovered it was a real proposal. But mere days later, with the entire world rolling on the floor laughing (ROTFL) at Microsoft, the project was cancelled, or "flushed."
Too bad, because if they had based it on OSX, they could have included a copy of iWipe, an OSX utility designed to securely erase your hard drive so your data can't be recovered. (More info at http://freshlysqueezedsoftware.com/products/iwipe/.) Freshly squeezed software. This is beginning to hurt...

Rebuilding Email Databases
Most mail programs have a simple way to compact the mail database: in other words, to reduce the size of the file to reflect the fact that messages have been deleted within it. You may not know that this is NOT an automatic process. In Netscape, choose Compact This Mailbox or Compact Mailboxes from the File menu. In Eudora, click on the numbers at the lower left corner of each mailbox. They should read, for example, 125/6132/2447. This means that you have 125 messages, the size of the file is 6132K and the wasted space to be recovered is 2447. In Mail for OSX, choose Rebuild Mailboxes under the Mailboxes menu.
In Entourage and Outlook Express it is not this straightforward at all. You must quit the program, open the folder containing the application, and then double-click on its icon while holding down the Option key.
This brings up a dialog box that lets you choose a normal compaction or a full recovery. (The latter is what you use when you start having serious problems with the program: mailboxes won't open, etc.) If you have not compacted before, do it now. To really be secure, first duplicate your Microsoft User Data folder which contains your mail. Beware; some mail folders can be more than 300 megs in size and it is not unheard of for Outlook to die spectacularly and make your mail unrecoverable. Always include this folder in your backup strategy!

Is Your Motherboard Dying?
It isn't a scandal, it's a case of corporate espionage gone wrong. I read in a recent RISKS Digest about a tale involving a single materials chemist who left his job at Rubycon Corporation in Japan to work for a Chinese capacitor maker, Luminous Town Electric. (I love some of these Chinese English names. They sound a little quaint. I am certain that they are fully aware of this.)
In an extremely unclear statement, the fellow's "cow-orkers then defected with the formula" (for making the electrolyte used in electrolytic capacitors) to the place where they were already working and started shipping it to Taiwanese capacitor makers.
There was a small problem: the formula wasn't complete. The capacitors, which should have been good for up to 4,000 hours, started to die within a tenth of that. The capacitor outgasses (generates) hydrogen, which expands the case and pops the seals, leaking fluid onto the board. This can cause a short circuit in the board at some later time.
In short, computer motherboards, including some of those Intel/AMD-compatible boards sitting on the shelf in computer stores right now, could die within 1000 hours of use, or less. One factor is high stress: a busy circuit board is going to fail sooner than one thqt mostly sits there, waiting for the user to do something. Acer in Australia is especially hard-hit and is running out of replacement motherboards!
This affects routers, Cisco products and all those lesser-known names that come and go. But what about Macs? Not so far. I checked with the local Apple-authorized shops to see if there has been an upswing in board repairs and they say nope, it isn't happening. The suppliers of capacitors for Mac motherboards buy from sources that didn't use the defective electrolyte. But think about how many electronic devices you own!
Better start searching your stacked paper for those warranties and sales receipts, folks. All of the electronic devices you own that were made between 6 months and 2 years ago are at risk: DVD players, TVs, even cell phones. The good news? There isn't a thing you can do about it except open the case and look for ballooning capacitors and then wait to see what goes out next.

Opera is back
Opera, which "took its toys and walked away" last year is back with a beta but functional version 0.6 for Mac OSX. We are finally getting our share of browsers to choose from! No one can get by on just one in order to view all pages on the Net, so take a look. This might be worth adding to your collection, especially if you like helping developers test their beta versions. Due to the recent $750 million settlement between Microsoft and AOL, Netscape may be abandoned again because the terms include a five-year royalty-less agreement to distribute Internet Explorer as part of AOL.

OT: New Mini
Last month I joined a small minority of Americans. I acquired an object used by less than 5% of the country. It's something that is more than capable of satisfying the basic needs of transportation, but which could be filled sufficiently by a Saturn or a Taurus.
Together that car family holds a HUGE fraction of the auto market. People buy them because the work just fine for what they need. In fact, most owners, if asked, would say that their cars were a lot more reliable than their majority-market computers. They could have bought something interesting or imaginative, but they didn't. I did.
Oh, it's cool, and has a high sexy factor. BMW MiniCooper has created a brilliant marketing campaign: make a well-engineered product. Run a low-profile ad campaign consisting mostly of billboards here and there, good product placement, NO television ads and limited production. Give it a cachét that is difficult to create artificially by actually making a cool car that people want to buy based on how it looks, and then back that up with solid engineering and good user interface design. I think they did pretty well so I got one and I enjoy driving it.
All Mackers understand exactly what I am saying. That's exactly why Apple will survive and continue to innovate and sell enough computers to pay for all of this. We buy our machines because we like the way they handle.
So will BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes and Mini. And, of course, Ford and GM will learn from the advancements of others and get immeasurably rich off of it. I just hope Microsoft doesn't decide to diversify and buy BMW. Saab, for instance, lost a lot of its quirkyness and individuality when it was taken over by GM, but the company might not have survived if it hadn't.
Keep buying Apple's products so we don't have to worry about an external takeover.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)