Linked List: June 16, 2006

Friday, 16 June 2006

Juggling Oranges 

Mark Pilgrim:

The first 90% of John Gruber’s And Oranges is excellent. Everyone should read it, and I’m not just saying that because it’s all about me. Unfortunately, the last 10% goes right off the rails, so naturally that’s where I’m going to start.

DF T-Shirt on TLC 

DF reader “Editor B” wore his classic DF t-shirt when he was featured on a special on The Learning Channel.

Macworld: Black and White MacBooks Benchmark Differently 

The differences are attributable to the hard drives being from different manufacturers; the 60 GB Seagate drive in the white MacBooks is faster at most tasks than the 80 GB Fujitsu drive in the black ones, despite the fact that both are running at 5,400 RPM. Other than the iPhoto importing test, however, the differences are pretty small.

Why Not Ballmer? 

In the wake of Bill Gates’s announcement that he’s stepping down from day-to-day management at Microsoft in two years, Owen Thomas from Business 2.0 says Steve Ballmer should pack his bags too. Jack Schofield, blogging for The Guardian, points out why this is unlikely:

It would be a much bigger deal if Steve Ballmer was stepping down, which is what a lot of geeks would prefer. Gates is a nerd. Ballmer is a salesman and would probably have made a great high school football coach, neither of which appeals to geek sensibilities. But he’s taken Microsoft sales from $25bn (2001) to $40bn (2005) and annual profits from $7.3bn to $12.3bn, almost doubling EPS. That sort of performance is not likely to get him fired.

Further proof that Ballmer likely isn’t leaving anytime soon: Thomas quotes none other than our good friend Rob Enderle as predicting that Ballmer will leave soon after Gates.

Jackass of the Week: Richard Koman 

Richard Koman wrote this report for O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter on the California Court of Appeal ruling against Apple’s attempt to subpoena email records from the ISPs for PowerPage and AppleInsider. For analysis on the ruling’s “impact on the industry”, Koman turns to Rob Enderle, whom he quotes via email:

“Apple is really the only firm that doesn’t use nondisclosure agreements and, as a result, they stood alone in this. So, other then [sic] a few execs likely feeling superior because they guessed the outcome of this correctly (did anyone really think it was going to end differently?) this should have little impact on the Valley.”

This is so false it’s laughable. Apple is arguably the most NDA-happy company in the entire industry. Apple probably has its janitors signed to NDAs. And as MDJ pointed out, the appeals court specifically noted that in this case, Apple’s employees had signed NDAs regarding the Asteroid technology. (MDJ further notes that even leaving aside point about NDAs, Enderle is still wrong about Apple “[standing] alone in this” — amicus briefs supporting Apple were filed by IBM, Genentech, and the Information Technology Industry Council).

For just passing this easily-refuted obvious nonsense along as though it were true, Richard Koman is our jackass of the week.

My First BillG Review 

Joel Spolsky recalls his first meeting with Bill Gates, back when Spolsky was a product manager for Excel in 1992. (Side note: the date issue with 1900 not being a leap year is the reason why the Macintosh epoch starts on 1 January 1904, instead of 1900).