Image credit: NASA
Ed: The following is a rumor column — and the opinions, commentary and overall ennui of Sid Shadow do not necessarily reflect those of aNewDomain.
I should have posted this earlier but someone couldn’t find her pumps. Things fly everywhere in the throws of passion. So instead of writing, I’ve been … consoling.
Apple will have a lot of consoling to do — turns out schools, businesses and other budget-minded customers who have older Macs with Intel-made GMA 950 and GMA X3100 integrated graphic processors inside won’t be able to run the next version of OS X.
As I’ve been trying to warn you, Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, announced yesterday and due this summer, won’t run at all on those older machines — we’re talking iMacs and a number of other pre 2010 systems, from lime iMacs to Macbooks. Apple has time for damage control, though. Maybe there’s an app for that.
The schools will put pressure on Apple, that much is for sure. Schools have a big chunk of those old machines. District level schools can’t suddenly inflate budgets for an all new set of machines just to get Mountain Lion. Talk about thinking different.
And how many billion page view videos are there on YouTube again? Well, maybe none. Or maybe … who knows? A lot of those huge numbers are the result of click fraud. Turns out Google did tweak its own search algorithms to weed this problem out, but it didn’t do it for YouTube, which Google owns, until fairly recently, when Google began focusing on putting real money into original content.
So it is looking like 90 percent of those previous view counts were bogus. Eat that Honey Badger!
Makes me wonder. Does Hulu have some adjustments to do next? Netflix doesn’t have this problem, you know.
Anyway. Remember when AT&T was trying to swallow T-Mobile and Dish Network stepped in to not really make a better offer, but to make a grab at bandwidth?
Well, Dish Networks, the supposed value leader in satellite-delivered TV is now very much for sale.
Wall Street is almost even paying attention. Got to wonder though what is motivating that sale now.
Could it be the rising mountain of customer complaints that those prices seem to change so frequently and that cancellation is very nearly impossible? Even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is paying attention. Maybe Dish is feeling the pressure because DirecTV’s commercials are just so good.
Or maybe Dish knows Apple is shopping for a service just like the one it provides, however annoyingly. Apple TV may take many forms, but more than anything Apple needs TV content to make that TV fly.
One easy way to get that is to pick up a good sized cable TV MSO, with built-in carriage agreements. Netflix does have this problem. Its CEO Reed Hastings might do something about it, too.
Dish Network is an MSO too, with an easily jettisoned headcount, and infrastructure mostly already paid for. Think about it. Apple could control satellites. Makes that spaceship campus look more interesting.
One of the joys of the Mac OS is that it could make old hardware feel faster, keeps those aging machines feel fresh, and helps last. It will be a shame if Apple can’t make Mountain Lion happier there.
My friend never found her shoes in that tiny hotel room off the 101. Maybe it landed behind the two thousand pound immovable dresser. Or maybe there are objects dropping into random eddies in the space time continuum floating about hotel rooms. That is slightly unsettling but it would explain many things.
I’m Sid Shadow, slipping back to the dark. See you next week.
Sid seems to have been trapped in one of those eddies in the space time continuum.