Apple's Jobs Takes a Third Medical Leave but Remains CEO - CNBC

Apple's Jobs Takes Medical Leave but Remains CEO - CNBC


I hope Mr. Job's finds good health in the future and is able to return to the work that he loves, at Apple.

I Really Like The Dual Display Set Up

These 2007 Dell ISP LCD monitors calibrate nice in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard. However, Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard disables your ability to use the OS's System Preferences to calibrate these older, non-Apple, third party displays.

I really like the dual display set up. One small thing I like about moving away from CRT displays, over to the LCD environment, is that I don't hear the Cathode Ray Electron Gun "kick-start" when ever I wake the computer up. I'm glad these 2007 Dell ISP LCDs have come down to an affordable price range. I'm glad to move away from CRTs after using them in my business for over 10 years.

A Caution To Snow Leopard Users . . .

Dell UltraSharp 2007WFP 20.1" S-IPS LCD Monitor Wide
If you are a Mac user, this monitor is a good IPS display technology alternative to buying an Apple Cinema Display. These displays calibrate nicely, especially if you are using the System Preferences / Display Calibration Assistant in Mac OS 10.4 Tiger or Mac OS 10.5 Leopard.

The Apple & Dell IPS LCD displays don't have external contrast adjusters. With the IPS LCD, there is no contrast adjustment on the display or in the Mac OS. It stays in the right contrast all the time. Only Brightness and RGB levels can be adjusted externally as well as selecting PC Mode and Mac Mode. So with Tiger and Leopard, the contrast is about right so that I can begin the calibration process, starting with adjusting the External Brightness Control on the monitor to get the black levels to match, in System Preferences / Display Calibration Assistant.

But in Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, the default-fixed contrast setting is too bright in the black and shadowed areas, so it's impossible to manually adjust the brightness to get the black levels to match in System Preferences / Display Calibration Assistant. So, all of the monitors' external controls are functioning in Snow Leopard but Snow Leopard's new default brightness is beyond the Dell monitor's external adjustment range as it is with most older Apple CRT displays and most other non-Apple third-party Mac-friendly LCD displays.

So this monitor is great for calibrating with Mac OS 10.4 Tiger or Mac OS 10.5 Leopard but Snow Leopard will render this monitor un-usable. It's almost like Apple is treating all third party-non-Apple displays like "Jail-Broken" iPhones. 

Another Mac Mini Re-design . . .

It looks like Apple came up with a new way to keep the Mac Mini from cannibalizing iMac sales, they raised the entry level price point to $700. But it looks like they redesigned the enclosure so that it is easier to get inside to swap out memory DIMMs.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/

It's interesting to see that they gave it the all aluminum enclosure treatment and, with the HDMI port, it looks like it is now a better media server for someone's TV/family room.

The Mini is an interesting product to watch in it's slow evolution. My mac support friend shared with me these thoughts about about the new Mini:

"From an engineering perspective, there are two flaws with the new mini:

1 - The aluminum case will likely attenuate the wireless signal and people will complain about the limited range compared to the plastic mini. Any metal enclosure surrounding an antenna presents a Faraday shield and as demonstrated with the aluminum laptops, G5 and Mac Pro, reception range is quite limited when compared with the MacBook and prior plastic laptops.

2 - The 5400 RPM hard drives cannot move data as quickly as 7200 RPM hard drives. At $700, there's no excuse. The days of the under-performing Performa are long gone.

Why Apple insists on handicapping the mini's performance, I don't know. In my not so humble opinion, the mini should be the equivalent of an iMac without the LCD panel. Their fear of cannibalizing iMac sales is unfounded until they try. The industrial design aesthetics of an aluminum enclosure do look good and I give them credit for making the mini service friendly.

I'll be keeping an eye out for the early adopters' reports on the reduced wireless range... – JGT"

SATA Hard Drive Partitioning Is a Little Touchy Under Tiger

SATA hard drive partitioning is a little touchy unless you have Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leapard. Before I got my recently acquired '07 Mac Pro set up to be my workstation, I found it's 2-year old stock internal SATA drive was way too noisy to be my regular internal hard drive. So I did not replace it with the best brand but possibly the most quietest, Seagate. Their 1TB drive was their smallest drive that promised to be quiet and yet still have 32 MBs of disk cash. It also is called a SATA II drive. I did not buy any of the server or enterprise class drives since there was no indication in their specs that they were quiet.

I read on the web that you can partition any Altra ATA drive anyway you want with no negative consequence but if you use the Mac OS 10.4 OEM install DVD to partition a SATA drive you can create unreliability in your data. The cure is to partition only with a Leopard or Snow Leopard install DVD because Leopard's Disk Utility only partitions SATA drives within specific parameters to ensure drive reliability. The OS 10.4 Disk Utility does not.

I looked into buying Leopard just to have the better SATA drive partitioning ability but I did not want to install the unstable Leopard OS and I did not want to pay the $117 for it. Snow Leopard looked like the better investment but I was under the impression that Snow Leopard won't install unless I already own a Leopard Install DVD. So, I went ahead anyway and used my Tiger install DVD to partition my new Seagate SATA drive to 886 GBs for the boot partition, 22 GBs for the Jobs 1 partition and 22 GBs for the Jobs 2 partition. After a couple weeks of use, Photoshop CS4 was giving me error messages when I tried to save a 60 MB file to partition "Jobs 1", which had 350 MBs of free space left. The error message was, "Unable to save file due to a drive error." I could not fix the problem on this partition.

I was frustrated at the prospect of having to buy Leopard. Then on the "Your Mac Life" internet radio show, Shawn King interviewed Ted Landau, of Macfixit.com, about Snow Leopard. Ted says Apple does not require you to authenticate that you already own or run Leopard in order to own and install Snow Leopard. Apple knows there are so few Intel-based Mac users, running Tiger, there was no need to require users to have Leopard to install Snow Leopard. So I have bypassed Leopard and purchased the Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard install DVD on Amazon.com for $26.50, with sales tax and free shipping. I'll use the Snow Leopard Install DVD to properly partition my new SATA drive and then install Tiger or possibly Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard does have a more streamlined version of Rosetta, for running PowerPC apps, that you can opt to include in the Snow Leopard installation or leave out. I might do some tests to see if Snow Leopard will work for me at this time, with my Retrospect 5 Client, under Rosetta. I might read in the Adobe Forums to see if Creative Sweat 3 & CS4 users are getting better stability from 10.6 Snow Leopard than they did with 10.5 Leopard.

Oh well, I'm paying the price in down time for ignoring helpful tech info about SATA drive partitioning but I'm glad I can get a usable install DVD of Snow Leopard, for under $30, so that I can partition my internal SATA drive the correct and reliable way.

The 80's are Relevant at the Henry Ford Museum

I had the privilege of visiting the Henry Ford Museum when I took my wife and mother in-law to visit their ailing relative in Dearborn, MI, this past early April. Many men, older than myself, have always enjoyed seeing well preserved cars that were shipping new when they were young. Back in the 80's, while in my early and mid 20s, I had a passion for a lot of things, including cars that were progressive, for their time, for their design and reliability.




The Henry Ford Museum had two cars that really stood out to me in the 1980s – a 1983 Honda Accord and a 1986 Ford Taurus. They were both on display, pristine and new looking, and it made me feel like I had gone back in time. I always thought that these models were unique compared to the disparaging products GM was shipping at that time. Honda raised the bar of consumer expectations for what a car should be and Ford responded to the new customer expectations with the Taurus, which was the number one selling family sedan in the late 80s.

Mail-order Baby Cleveland Flowering Pair Tree

Our mail-order baby Cleveland Flowering Pair tree blossomed for the first time.