I just want to quickly comment that I think that Apple’s software strategy is utterly and completely brilliant. I’m thinking specifically of iTunes, iMovie, and now iPhoto here. There are about 20x more PC users than Mac users out there, and you know what, nobody has yet come up with a good system for managing a library of MP3s on a PC. FreeAmp used to be OK, but then they screwed it up. WinAmp seems to be working on it. Don’t get me started on Windows Media Player, and I don’t use Real Jukebox for the same reason that I don’t voluntarily infect my computer with email viruses.

Anyway, Apple seems committed to building a suite of best of breed software that make it easy to do the things with computers that lots of people are using them for nowdays. Office suites, email clients, and web browsers are already taken, interfacing with digital gadgets and managing various kinds of media files are not. I really believe the reason Apple came up with the iPod is that there wasn’t a suitable digital music player already on the market. You don’t see the iDigitalCamera or the iCamcorder because there are already plenty of great products out there in those categories.

Apple is defining a compelling niche for itself by not only building beautiful and functional hardware, and a killer operating system, but also bundling lots of great applications with it as well. The price difference between an iMac and a consumer model Gateway PC seems less extreme when you realize that it comes with some killer applications that you just can’t get for your PC. Apple’s decision to invest time and money building these great applications and then distribute them for free (other than iMovie) is really going to pay off, I think. Certainly they’re making me wish I’d opted for an iBook instead of the Toshiba laptop I bought so I could play games.

This week’s Economist has a brief but powerful defense of pure science. The sad thing is, of course, that expenditures on pure science require justification.

You can put Rep. Rick Boucher (a Virginia Democrat) on the short list of politicians in Washington, DC that aren’t wastes of skin. He’s writing a bill that will override the anti-circumvention statutes in the DMCA so that people can make copies of copyrighted media for personal use. Of course the majority of his colleagues will probably shoot down the idea with extreme prejudice as they stuff campaign dollars into their pockets, courtesy of the big media conglomerates. At least we know that there’s somebody out there who isn’t just an honorary member of the legislative wing of the RIAA or MPAA.

faqs.org has no funding and will go the way of the dinosaur unless users help pick up the tab.

Hey, Mr. President, try familiarizing yourself with the first amendment. From his speech in Portland:

And if we find somebody who wants to harm America, who espouses the philosophy that’s terrorist and bent, I can assure you we will bring that person to justice. This nation is on alert, and it should be.

Something kind of funny occurred to me today as I was reading Mark Pilgrim’s weblog. He mentioned that his girlfriend had a hard time keeping up with the fact that you could have applications running under the Mac OS that have no windows open at any given time. This must seem like bizarre behavior to people used to other operating systems, but this was an awesome feature back in the days when the Mac OS became capable of running multiple applications.

Back then, applications opened even more slowly than they do today. When you used applications like Pagemaker or Photoshop, starting them up initially took forever. Fortunately, you could just close all the windows but leave the applications open as long as you had enough RAM (don’t get me started on virtual memory on the Mac back then). It was a real time saver to just leave all of your applications open all day, and then switch to them and open a document when you needed them. These days, of course, it seems bizarre because applications (for the most part) open quickly enough that such a feature is no longer needed, and more importantly, Windows just doesn’t work that way, so people have been trained differently.

Anyway, what I find interesting, in a “things come full circle” kind of way, is that Mozilla features a “Quick Launch” feature that basically turns Windows into a Mac. When you start up Mozilla, it stays in memory even if you close all of its windows. That way you don’t have to re-launch it every time you want to use it, you can just click on the icon and a new instance of the already running application will appear. It’s kind of an interesting hack, and should seem quite familiar to grizzled Mac users.

Joel on Software: Fire And Motion. I like reading that other people are often (usually?) unproductive, because it makes me feel better about my own frequent lack of productivity. (Or maybe you thought I got paid to update rc3.org many times a day …)

The New York Times has an exclusive today: they were allowed to accompany a Special Forces detachment in performing its duties around Kandahar. The team’s current mission is to assist the new leadership of the city in creating a secure and stable environment. When I read stories like this, I feel very proud of the US military. These guys are doing noble work.

Salon: The geeks who saved Usenet

Well Apple’s first big announcement was widely anticipated — the flat-panel iMac lives. It looks sort of like a studio lamp, with a dome base to weigh it down and the screen on an adjustable arm. (I didn’t like the way it looked until I realized it was supposed to look like a desk lamp.) The computer’s guts live in the lamp base, which means that the computer really won’t take up a lot of desk space. I think it’s going to be a big hit.