Web Applications and why they won’t work right now

I recently got involved in a discussion on the Mac OS X hints forums regarding the move toward online web apps as evidenced by Photoshop Express and the iPhone’s first development platform.

 

I’d like to offer my own take, if I may.

 

While the idea of a decentralized system of applications would be a nice idea on paper, it doesn’t bode well for certain people. Hackers of the good variety cannot write interface haxies or plugins for certain programs, retailers will lose money and pretty much be cut out of the picture, unless an option to, oh say, buy the license at a brick and mortar store and redeem it online exists.

 

Meanwhile, it may be a good thing for the end user. Data may be backed up automatically to a server, the person can move to a different computer and have no productivity loss or have to move the program to a different computer or have any licensing mess going on.

 

But, as exciting as this tech is, there exists a certain disadvantage to both sides, which would be the connection to these computers.

 

Unfortunately, our internet connections in the ‘States are nowhere near good enough to handle this traffic. With Cable and Fiber optic being our fastest internet, it is obvious: For the productivity, we will want to do our work on our workstations as the internet connection to the actual computer hosting the application will bottleneck the performance and cost the end user in productivity.

 

Another point which comes to mind is our overall internet reliability. Through the process of working with files and utilizing the full capability of the application, can the connection hold up with no dropouts?

 

Not very likely. Two of the bigger network operators (Comcast, AT&T, I’m looking in your direction) are very unreliable. Comcast uses draconian policies to police their network, and AT&T’s network is downright unreliable.

 

To put the wrap on this, web apps are feasible, just not right now. Maybe ten years from now, it’ll work.

Personal crap you probably don’t want to read

Some things as of late have provoked this. For those who wish to skip, I’ll hide it under a break. But I have to get it off my chest.

Opinion Piece on computer repair

I suppose I should insert a nice warning: I might get a bit ranty in this post.

That being said…

 

New Blog

Not really, but I have created a new wordpress blog for all my workplace sucks, blows, and outright WTFs.

It’s located at http://itoilet9.wordpress.com/

 Have fun. 

The Temperature game

So while I can agree my MacBook runs fine at 3000rpm and 80F temperature, I kind of get sick of hearing that annoying buzzing that comes out of the vent.

So I set out to fiddle with SMCfancontrol to see at what point I could get the MacBook to be the quietest and coolest. Below are my results.

This is a 2.0GHz Santa Rosa MacBook with 1GB RAM and an 80GB HD with the Intel GMA X1300 (Or 3100. I screw it up all the time.) running Mac OS X 10.5.2.

I started out at 3500rpm, which got me to 80F running iTunes, Safari, iChat, Mail.

At this point, keeping the same things running, changed up to 3000rpm, which did little. (85F)

Down to 2500rpm, and we get a significant change. This time, the temperature climbs to 99F, and hovers around that point. Great.

Bringing it down to ~2200 now…we have now broken 100F, and there it is staying. Let’s go lower. This isn’t getting anywhere. So I go to /Users/chris/Library…press Cmd+A…and finally, Cmd+O. Look at that! Then I get crazy with Cmd+W, which spikes the temperature to 108F.

Let’s bring it down to 2000rpm and see what happens. Idle temperature is now 104F. All windows open, all close, 115F final result.

Last…let’s try the bare minimum. 1800F. (I should note here that 2krpm is the minimum the MBP supports.)

Same tests…and 120F. Feh. I’m not satisfied. Xbench time.

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc2=247837

My MacBook hit 140F during the benchmark. Not bad. 

Sarbanes-Oxley sucks

So I retract my previous statement, blaming Apple for the pricing on the iPod touch. While I could explain in my own words, I believe Michael Mistretta puts it best in his blog post, which can be found here.

In case you don’t want to read a lot, here’s where he’s spot on:

“It’s the law. Unfortunately, there is a horrible little law called Sarbanes-Oxley, that legally doesn’t allow you to add features to products that you have already been paid for. Apple couldn’t add features for free. They had to charge something for them. Apple has gotten around this for the iPhone and AppleTV, by accounting for their payments over the course of 24 months. This means that they can keep adding new features to your iPhone or AppleTV for free for up to two years. They didn’t use this accounting method for the iPod Touch however. This means that legally, they can’t just add apps to the iPod Touch for free. Why charge $20 then? Why not just charge $1? The $20 for 5 apps comes out to about $4 per app. This is most likely the price that Apple will be selling third-party apps at, and wanted to keep their prices consistent.” 

Oh for f’s sake Apple, what are you doing?

See here: http://gizmodo.com/364788/iphone-20-update-available-for-free-in-june-touch-users-get-to-pay-up-again

For the love of all who care about you, what are you doing Apple?

Why must you insist on charging the living crap out of those who bought an iPod touch?

I’ll type more later.

Leopard, permissions, and much ugh.

Looks like I’m getting caught up in Leopard’s draconian permissions system.It does great and is pretty much transparent when you aren’t busy fighting it off. When it gets in your way, however, it brings things screaming to a halt.I downloaded some NIN off BitTorrent (Their Ghosts series) and tried to add it to my iTunes Library, only to be greeted by this mean message: I’m confused, so I decide to take the logical step of rebooting and running a permissions check. It catches on a LOT of items, but unfortunately, it didn’t cure this.So I tried rebooting onto my MacBook Pro’s restore disc (Which, as you might recall, is Tiger) and ran Disk Utility’s disk check. No dice. Volume appeared fine.Seeing as this may be a really big problem, I try pulling my music away from the music directory, only to be kicked in the nuts repeatedly:Good lord what the f— is going on?So failing that, I try one last thing, doing a Command-I and checking my permissions.I got this:I have custom access, meaning something’s up here…So, I turned to Terminal, my last hope, which showed:

Last login: Wed Mar  5 02:24:10 on ttys000

Azrael:~ christurpin$ ls -l

total 0

drwxr-xr-x   2 christurpin  staff    68 Feb  8 21:47 BitTorrent Downloads

drwx——+ 21 christurpin  staff   714 Mar  5 02:33 Desktop

drwx——+ 17 christurpin  staff   578 Feb 29 02:50 Documents

drwx——+ 11 christurpin  staff   374 Mar  5 00:22 Downloads

drwxr-xr-x  40 christurpin  staff  1360 Feb 13 00:29 Incomplete

drwx——+ 40 christurpin  staff  1360 Feb 28 18:16 Library

drwx——+  3 christurpin  staff   102 Feb  6 17:11 Movies

drwx—rwx+  7 christurpin  staff   238 Mar  5 02:25 Music

drwx——+ 11 christurpin  staff   374 Feb 29 02:50 Pictures

drwxr-xr-x+  6 christurpin  staff   204 Feb  8 23:29 Public

drwxr-xr-x   5 christurpin  staff   170 Feb  8 16:52 Ringtones

drwxr-xr-x  18 christurpin  staff   612 Feb 13 00:35 Shared

drwxr-xr-x+  5 christurpin  staff   170 Feb  6 17:11 Sites

Azrael:~ christurpin$ 

Not much hope remains in my music, I can see… UPDATE: On the advice of Andy in the comments, I tried pulling a chmod on the offending folder, and it was successful (giving read and write access to all users), but still wouldn’t let me at it. Seriously, what has Mac OS X gotten itself into? 

Weird.