Apple and price hikes: classic dilemma

I sympathize with everybody involved in this CNet story about Apple hiking pricing on the new iMacs by $100. It’s certainly easy to feel sympathy for the customers and the retailers. It’s harder to feel sympathy for Apple, but they’re really caught in a classic bind.

In my system dynamics class, we were talking about the rise and fall of the low-price airline People Express. My professor suggested that they made a product that was so attractive and cheap that their growth spiral grew out of control. They didn’t have a large enough supply of qualified staff, so their product kept getting worse and worse until they started racking up massive losses since they lost all their customers. A conclusion was that a price hike might have made the product less attractive and given the company more breathing room to fulfill expectations.

The iMac price hike shows the other side of that story. Sometimes hiking prices just pisses everyone off.
more…

Apple and Bluetooth: The next USB?

The announcement from MacWorld Tokyo that Apple will support Bluetooth is interesting. Bluetooth, the little “standard that isn’t,” has been having some problems getting traction. Will Apple’s move to support Bluetooth do the same thing for this standard that earlier decisions did for USB and 802.11b wireless networking?

Probably not. At this stage, Apple is committing to support Bluetooth only via a plug-in USB adapter. That’s very different from bundling the technology with all your new computers.
more…

Akamai on the move

Since the Boston real estate market hasn’t really caught up with the slump, it’s not surprising that Akamai will be breaking its lease to move out of the Cambridge block that it shares with Forrester and the MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences. No word yet on the new location, but the $15 million termination fee to MIT has to be good news to the school… at least until it’s time to find someone else to move in.
more…

Two down…

The crash I was experiencing before when updating department names multiple times has gone. I think the lesson is that you need to either update an array in a plist with an array of the same length, or to change it to zero length and write the new array.

One problem down – search and replace

Shortly after I posted my last cry of despair over random crashing, I downloaded a new example AppleScript Studio project that contained a Cocoa string replacement method, rather than the one I had been using before which toggled AppleScript’s text delimiters back and forth. Making the switch cost me nothing in execution time and appears to have eliminated the crashing bug. I had to alter the Cocoa method so that it wasn’t doing case insensitive searching, but otherwise easy as pie. Next one… crashing when updating the department list.

Well, darn.

On a tip from a mailing list, I tried a change to Manila Envelope this morning to see whether I could stop an intermittent crashing bug. The change may have stopped the crashes, but unfortunately it also screwed up the text being posted quite badly. Apologies to all who were confused by posts on the page (or in the RSS) that said something like: “tMcWrldTky,pplennuncedBluetthsupprtfrtheMc”.

For the record, if your script is designed to convert accented characters to HTML entities, it’s a bad idea to convert them to Unicode first. It apparently converts them down to regular unaccented characters rather than their proper Unicode entities. When you search and replace on a regular vowel, this is what you get…

NY Times on Radio

The latest from Userland… full New York Times headlines in Radio UserLand. Having previously subscribed to Times feeds from NewsIsFree, I can only guess at the technical differences. Dave has been talking for days now about new drivers to allow Radio’s news page to pick up non-RSS XML-based news sources. My guess is Dave made an agreement with the Times to allow Userland to syndicate an existing XML format there and gave Radio the ability to read it. I think (but am not sure) that this is different from the way NewsIsFree works.

From a qualitative perspective? NewsIsFree’s feeds don’t include bylines; their opinion feed doesn’t include letters to the editor. Their feeds appear to be more selective and differently formatted.

Is Dave competing with NewsIsFree? Not in the professional market; their response to my story about syndication makes that pretty clear. But what is he doing? Userland’s not about content, it’s about providing pipes for content. The New York Times feeds appear to be the demo for this new Radio capability.

Moving slowly

Spring break is here. I’m taking the advice of one of my professors; in a group meeting yesterday, she told us, “You all look really tired. Go home and get some sleep.” Yes ma’am. Well, some sleep and some EV Nova…

OmniOutliner2OPML v. 1.0.2

The new version of OmniOutliner2OPML, v. 1.0.2, has been released. It now produces something that looks like conformant XML–attributes of an <outline> element are now within the base tag, and outline elements without children are closed inline with an “/&gt”. If you have an OPML compatible application, I’d appreciate hearing if you can parse output from my script.
more…

A real mind bomb: Free RCS

The Radio Community Server, which hosts communities of Radio UserLand users behind the firewall, is now available at no charge. What does this mean? Radio is great knowledge management software–you blog about stuff going on (in your life or your industry or your project) and it automatically flows out to other people who have subscribed to your newsfeed. They get it downloaded to their desktops when they’re not looking.

Free? I wasn’t expecting this business move, Dave, but it’s smart. It’s easier for people to understand the benefits of Radio than of the RCS, but once they start playing with the RCS and realize the implications they’ll expand use of Radio inside their organization. Razor and blades, razor and blades… 🙂
more…

Love is in the air…

Congratulations to my (distant) cousin Scott who, rumors have it, got engaged over the weekend. Scott was a little bit like a big brother that we only saw once a year when I was growing up. Best wishes to Scott and Karen–you’re about to start a really good journey.

Escape Velocity: Nova…

…is out. The latest installment of Ambrosia’s space opera game clocks in at 75 MB, explaining why Ambrosia’s site is essentially unreachable. Looks like I now have something to do with that short break between my last class this week and our flight to New Jersey on Friday. 🙂

I was seriously addicted to the previous installment in the series, Escape Velocity Overdrive, a few years back. This should be really good.

Good morning

Snow falling on Boston streets this morning. Quite a kiss-off from winter.

I’ll be working on two last assignments due tomorrow (the last day before our spring break starts Wednesday). Between that and a raspy throat I need to get checked by the doctor I’ll be away from blogging today. Talk amongst yourselves.

One last thought–as I was trying to think last night about ways to improve OmniOutliner2OPML, I realized that what’s really needed is a translation the other way, from OPML into OmniOutliner. I may start looking at that, though I doubt I’ll have it out before we leave for Italy.

BTW, is anyone else doing anything with OPML? One reader wrote in to say he was curious about my script but since he only had one app (Radio UserLand) that supported OPML, he really couldn’t do much with it…