Hal O'Brien

An email from Roku tells me Vimeo is now part of their Channel Store. That means such things as The Third and the Seventh and the Playing for Change global collaborative version of "Stand By Me" should be watchable on our TV. Cool.

Yeah... I gotta think the new Apple iTV is aimed squarely at Roku, given the Netflix integration. We'll see.

The cable of May 27th does not resolve the snow crash problem.

That is all.

When it has something to do with Apple.

The New York Times has a blog piece on the iPad's arrival in Japan, and the stir it's allegedly causing. They use this as a peg for a larger analysis about the Japanese feeling like they've lost their competitive edge, not only to Apple, but to South Korea's Samsung, Taiwan's Acer, etc.

Along the way, they drop an eyebrow raising stat:

"Shipments of the iPhone more than doubled, to 1.69 million units, in the year ended in March, giving Apple a 72 percent share of the country’s smartphone market, according to the MM Research Institute."

Eyebrow raising enough that I went looking at it. There are a few problems.

The most obvious: Note the 72% figure is of "smartphone" sales. The thing is, smartphones don't sell well in Japan (or anywhere else). The iPhone's actual market share in Japan among all cell phones is 4.9%, according to the very same report from MM Research Institute Ltd. quoted for the 72% figure.

Now, mind you, that is slightly better than the iPhone's global market share among cell phones -- which is 3 percent in Q1 2010. (Smartphones sold 54.7 mil units; they're 18.8% of global sales; that yields global sales among total devices of 290.96 mil units; of which Apple sold 8.8 mil.)

Around the world, 97% of the market looks at the iPhone -- and buys something else. In Japan, "only" 95% of all customers buy something else, but it still ain't great.

The iPhone has a smaller market share than Linux. And Steve Jobs has yet to trade in his "reality distortion field" for a "reality clarification field."

Minimax just did a another snow crash.

It still does that about every 4-6 weeks, so nothing new there.

What was new this time was, it did it progressively while I was working on the machine. I saw what looked like transparent horizontal bands of the TV-like snow; then the whole desktop was mildly transparently "snowy" while the band of most snow continued to jump around the screen; then the whole thing went to flat-out snow.

JWMA.

Minimax just did a snow crash again.

Not the standard one, though. This time it happened while running Front Row as I was doing the dishes. The screen had gone completely blank, as if the system was trying to run the screensaver. OTOH, I thought the whole point of the album cover flips in Front Row was to inhibit the screensaver -- perhaps I'm wrong.

So, with the screen dark, I pressed Shift to get out of the saver... And then saw snow. As I was sitting there thinking, "Oh, no. Not this again. Now what?" the audio continued to play. Then suddenly, the snow cleared, and I had Front Row's normal screen again. It's the first time I've seen a snow crash clear of its own accord.

AKICOLJ: I ask again, "Now what?" Go ahead and take it back to Apple? Grit my teeth and bear it?

EDITED TO ADD: I just went into Energy Saver in System Preferences, and set both Computer Sleep and Display Sleep to "Never." I also unchecked the "hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" option. ADDING TO THE ADDITION: OK, I've dialed it back a bit from there, but by as little as I can -- 3 hours before sleep.

So I went to the Genius Bar at Southcenter to have my Mac Mini looked at for the snow crash problem. (No, I didn't mention the web form issue. Ach, well.)

Anyway, my expectation was that they'd either a) try to troubleshoot the specific screen saver software, or b) replace the memory chips, since I think the Mac Mini uses shared memory for video.

Nope. They're going to replace the MLB, which is Apple's IBM-like TLA for "main logic board" -- what the rest of the industry calls a motherboard.

{blink}

Well. That's unexpected. In a good way -- it's a more substantive replacement than I thought likely.

That's the good news; that and it's covered by warranty, so no charge. The bad news is, they gave me a 3-5 day turnaround timeframe. On the gripping hand, it's not like I haven't been using akirlu's PC for months at a stretch lately.

I'd dearly love to see their database for how frequently the problem has come up.

I heard an interview with Jeffrey Rosen, who has an article in today's New York Times. The article is called "Silicon Valley's Spy Game", and it's all about how many Valley companies are rearranging their products to be sold as national security and anti-terrorism items.

Prominent among these companies is Oracle. Oracle tends to pitch their databases as great predictive tools -- Amazon can guess which books you'll buy because they track you in an Oracle database, your airline can predict your travel patterns, etc. Now they're trying to sell the idea that they can predict who terrorists are, just by integrating various governmental databases, both at the Federal and local level.

But...

In an anecdote not in the Times article, Rosen told interviewer Terry Gross, on the radio program Fresh Air, how he visited Oracle's headquarters campus one day. Apparently, it's notoriously difficult to find parking there, and the space he finally found was far enough away from the door that he had to walk something like 15 minutes to get to the building.

Here's the big question: If Oracle can't even reliably predict how many people will park at their own building -- which is presumably why they haven't built adequate facilities, and not because, say, Larry Ellison is a cheap bastard who doesn't care about his employees much -- how reliable do you think they'll be at predicting terrorists?

Just a thought.

*^*^*^*

A related in-the-Valley parking anecdote.

Apple also has parking problems, it seems.

Steve Jobs is a guy well known for running late.

Apple, at the time, didn't have assigned parking.

So... One time, the Interim President for Life got into the lot, and everything was full.

He decided, in that ever-so-considerate Jobsian way of his, to park in a handicapped space.

When he returned to his car at the end of the day, he allegedly found a note stuck into his wiper blades:

"Park Different"