Linked List: October 18, 2007

Thursday, 18 October 2007

Torre Turns Down Yankees Offer 

Tyler Kepner, reporting on The New York Times’s Bats weblog:

The Yankees offered Manager Joe Torre a one-year deal with a base salary of $5 million and the chance to make another $3 million in performance bonuses. But after 12 years and 12 postseason appearances (including four World Series titles), Torre turned it down. [...]

General Manager Brian Cashman said that Torre’s successor has not been named, nor have potential candidates been formally identified. “I can promise you that the process is going to take some time,” Cashman said. “I ask for everyone’s patience as we review the individuals and make recommendations to ownership.”

DragThing 5.9 

James Thomson:

You can now finally insert and rearrange items in your docks without needing to make space first. Just drag and drop to your heart’s content.

This might be my favorite new DragThing feature ever.

Memory Randomization (ASLR) Coming to Leopard 

Ryan Naraine: “Apple has announced plans to add code-scrambling diversity to Mac OS X Leopard, a move aimed at making the operating system more resilient to virus and worm attacks.”

Rands: The Gel Dilemma 

There are two types of people: People who like to talk about pens, and people I don’t like.

BusinessWeek Drops the Serifs 

More on the BusinessWeek redesign, from Armin Vit at Brand New.

iPhone SDK Is an iPod SDK, Too 

Fraser Speirs:

I’ll repeat that, in case you’re still not getting it: the most popular portable music device in the world, the one everyone has, the default choice, the cultural icon, the device which Apple sells millions of each quarter, the device which has previously been closed off to all but Capcom, EA and Nike now has an SDK.

Periscope 1.5 

Update to Freeverse’s excellent webcam software.

‘Just Let Me Say It’ 

Steven Berlin Johnson:

What we’re starting to see here (and of course in the anti-DRM letter from earlier this year) is a pretty significant shift in Jobs’ public relations strategy, in that he seems to have recognized that there are limits to secrecy.

Johnson wonders whether Apple planned all along to open up iPhone development eventually; I say yes.

Mac U.S. Market Share Is Up 

Gartner’s and IDC’s numbers don’t match, but both agree that Apple is now #3 in unit sales, behind only Dell and HP. (Apple will drop back to #4 after Acer’s acquisition of Gateway is complete.) But the most important thing to remember is that Apple isn’t really after raw market share; they don’t offer any bargain PCs. The entirety of Apple’s market share is in the middle and high end of the market. Also impressive is that Mac sales are growing this fast before the release of Leopard.

The number I’d love to see computed is profit share — what share of the total profit in the PC hardware business do these companies have. I suspect Apple might be #1.

Researcher Claims Swearing at Work Boosts Morale 

Thus explaining the extraordinarily high morale here at DF HQ. (Via Chris Long.)

Amazon U.K. Pre-Order Links for Leopard 

£80 for the single-user version, £120 for the family pack — and both offer free shipping. (Update: They just dropped the price on the family pack from £129 to £120.)