Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

I was watching the MacWorld 2009 Apple Keynote live when a message appeared in the feed–”STEVE JOBS JUST DIED”–surprising everyone. In a few minutes, the MacRumors feed was full of coordinated hacked spam:

Highlighted is the beginning of the spam

MacRumors apologized for the incident: “Our MacRumorsLive keynote coverage was hacked today, inserting inappropriate content into the text and photo feeds. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to restore our services.” However, it was simply negligence on their part for having a control panel which was publicly accessible rather than some kind of nefarious hack. One of the nicer 4chan readers took this screenshot of it before it was taken offline:

See also When Livestreams Go Wrong and 4chan’s /g board where the chaos originated. Hopefully this will teach bloggers and web startups to pay more attention to the security of their websites, as hacking websites is growing more and more popular with savvy internet pranksters.

Today Apple released a press release, a Letter from Apple CEO Steve Jobs informing the world that his weight loss is not a recurrence of his pancreatic cancer, and that he is able to continue carrying out his duties as Apple’s CEO while recovering from his “hormone imbalance:”

Dear Apple Community,

For the first time in a decade, I’m getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for a Macworld keynote.

Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.

I’ve decided to share something very personal with the Apple community so that we can all relax and enjoy the show tomorrow.

As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause—a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.

Steve

This comes in response to a post on Gizmodo, Steve Jobs’ Health Declining Rapidly, Reason for Macworld Cancellation, which alleges that “Steves health is rapidly declining. Apple is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically vs letting the hype destroy apple when the inevitable news comes later this spring.”

When this latest revelation is coupled with the previous delays we’ve seen in reporting Job’s health problems, the only thing we can expect is worse news. If you follow Apple and appreciate its products, do not be surprised if Steve Jobs resigns as CEO, or is replaced by the Apple board following a deterioration in his health, or death.

Please see Disclosure & Legal Notice for information about conflicts of interest and this post.

It has to be said–Apple iTunes sucks. It’s freakishly slow on Windows. I don’t know what the problem is, but plugging in my iPhone into a USB 2.0 port to sync it causes the whole system to come to a drag. I’ve got 3 Gbs Seagate drives, 4 Gb of RAM, and I’m still running Windows XP so I can’t even blame Vista.

That leaves Apple holding all the blame. It’s not just syncing either. These are all slow:

• Importing new songs into my Library of 15K items (probably due to parsing, editing in place, and writing to disk a 10+ Mb XML file for each song) [who uses XML as a database...]
• Searching through my Library
• Playing any kind of high bitrate media or encoded video (I have an nVidia 8800 with 512 MB of RAM… it should be able to play a little 720p video smoothly)

Suspiciously, Mac users don’t complain iTunes is slow. Either Steve Jobs literally makes them duller so they tend not to notice the passage of time, or it’s just iTunes on Windows that sucks.

Are you an iPhone 3G user with a “No Wiki” greyed out on your settings? Do you see this when you access your phone’s settings?

For me, I’ve only seen it once. I have a first-generation iPhone. The solution and fix for this problem was simply to do a soft reset by holding down the top power button and the home button until it restarted, at which point the wifi was working again. As another point of reference, I use FIOS and have the ActionTec router they supply.

You should also check out iPhone WiFi Problems (aka greyed-out “No WiFi”) from earlier this year, where he indicates that for him, it was a hardware failure:

I have to say, after hours of working through all the things other people have tried, I am finally at the same place - I am pretty convinced that my colleague’s iPhone at least, is also a solid hardware failure.

Today Apple refreshed its Macbook Pro line with twin nVidia 9400M / 9600M GT GPUs, a glossy LED-backlit glass screen, the new multi-touch glass trackpad, and a slimmer .95″ thickness. The aluminum Macbook Pro body has been enhanced using Apple’s “precision aluminum unibody enclosure” design.

The regular consumer Macbook line has also been upgraded almost enough that even Apple’s own comparison charts show few differences between the inexpensive Macbooks ($999-$1599) and the Macbook Pros ($1999-$2799). For example, comparing the best 15″ Macbook Pro with the 13″ Macbook, I find little to distinguish it:

2.53GHz MacBook Pro (MB134LL/A) - $2,499
2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 6MB L2 cache, 1066MHz System Bus
4GB 1066 MHz DDR3 memory
320GB 5400 rpm HDD
NVIDIA GeForce 9600M graphics processor, 512MB GDDR3 memory

2.4GHz Macbook (MB467LL/A) - $1,599.00
2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 3MB L2 cache, 1066MHz System Bus
2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
250GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor, 256MB GDDR3 memory

When would you buy a Macbook Pro now? The $1,000 premium gets you a slightly bigger screen, another $50 worth of memory, a slightly bigger hard drive, and a much faster graphics card. For most people, the Macbook is the new Macbook Pro.