OLPC XO or MacBook Air?

Today, after MacWorld Expo, Africa has expressed a preference.

Personally, I'm underwhelmed by the thought of the Air - the trackpad and backlit keyboard may be nice touches that may appear on other MacBooks in time, but just one USB port and a mono speaker? The OLPC has three ports and stereo speakers - but it's thicker.

Mac OS X woes

I gave in and bought a new Macbook, reasoning that if I waited for Apple to really get its act together, I'd wait forever.

So far, I've discovered that the SaVi package that I maintain won't work at all on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, though SaVi works just fine on 10.4 Tiger - which my new Macbook can't run. So, I can't use my own software on my own laptop - at least until Tk gets revised to work with 10.5's menubar. I hope my other programming efforts will be more successful on the Mac, though installing some variant of Linux via Boot Camp is looking increasingly attractive. Which distro will be least problematic and just work?

I bought the black Macbook, reasoning that it would wear better and discolour less over time than white - and that it would also look good with a ++ungood; laptop sticker over that glowing white Apple. (Forced branding and advertising when there's something worth looking at on your screen? Great!) If only I could find where I put my stash of ++ungood; stickers...

I'd been thinking about buying a Mac laptop, for a number of reasons. Mac OS X 10.5 has finally shipped, I'm sick to death of Windows, I want a laptop that sleeps and shuts down and copies files when I tell it to without constant supervision to make sure the process completes, I need to run network simulations with ns and write networking code and cygwin is too flaky, I want to fix a Mac OS X-only bug in the development code of SaVi and then figure out why it and other third-party modules won't run under Geomview on the Mac...

And I wanted to do this over Christmas, in what little free time I had, rather than wait for the rumoured new portables at the January MacWorld. So the recently-updated Macbook looked like a good choice. But then I read of a critical copying bug in Mac OS X Leopard. The purchase will just have to wait another few OS and hardware revisions until Apple gets its act together. And even then, Macs still won't have error-correcting memory, which is why there are so many reports of adding memory leading to kernel panics.

Still, it's not as if Apple had its act together the last time I bought a Mac (a 6100/66 DOS Compatible in '96).

It looks like I'll just be spending Christmas fixing the SaVi texturemapping code to pipe directly to Geomview -- using cygwin.

The iPod plays two kinds of music: music crippled with Apple's DRM and MP3s.

-- Cory Doctorow, Universal goes DRM-free, BoingBoing, 9 August 2007.

Not true. The iPod plays two kinds of music - crippled with DRM, and free of DRM. Or the two major types of music file format - MP3 and AAC (AIFF and some other DRM-free formats are also supported on higher-end iPod models.) There are no DRM-encrypted MP3s. The AAC format provides higher audio quality than MP3, but doesn't have to be encrypted. AAC is an industry standard format and the successor to the MP3 format.

For record companies, there are only two choices: sell Apple-crippled music and increase Apple's control over the online music business, or sell uncrippled music.

And what about the third choice, which EMI took in April - selling uncrippled music through Apple, which might increase Apple's control over online music?

Doctorow has never let mere facts get in the way of his rhetoric.

I've just returned from the IETF 69 meeting held in Chicago. There, we talked about Saratoga, a fast file transfer protocol for use over dedicated links. Saratoga could be used with the bundle protocol intended for delay-tolerant networking, although it's just as useful on its own.

A report of that meeting made the front page of the Chicago Tribune:
'Netheads' gather in Chicago to improve Internet, Jon Van, 27 July 2007.
That article was the left-most column of the front page, above the fold, appearing on the same day as an opinion piece discussing when celebrity deaths merit the front page. So, this networking meeting ranks the same as Marilyn Monroe. Speaking of heavenly bodies... "Improve communication with Mars probes"? Yes, that would include us.