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Via The Macalope, Microsoft’s leaked reaction to Mac OS X’s new search capabilities:

Lenn Pryor:

You will have to take Vic’s disk…I am not giving mine up. Tonight I got on corpnet, hooked up Mail.app to my Exchange server and then downloaded all of my mail into the local file store. I did system wide queries against docs, contacts, apps, photos, music, and my Microsoft email on a Mac. It was f*cking amazing. It is like I just got a free pass to Longhorn land today.

Jim Allchin:

Yes. I know. It is hard to take. I don’t believe we will have search this fast.

The funny part for me as I read this is that they’re talking about Mac OS X 10.4 search. Mac OS X 10.4’s search worked, but it was very slow. Yet apparently, even that blew away what they had.

Still, it isn’t all bad for Microsoft: It looks like they at least realized the speed of search was important.

Macworld | A year after iTunes Plus, Apple faces stepped-up competition - Page 2

Music services shutting down may let DRM finally shows its teeth.
[...]
Microsoft is one company that’s recently had to deal with just this sort of problem. The company’s MSN Music venture stopped selling music in 2006, but only recently announced its intention to shut down the servers that let users continue to play purchased music at the end of this summer. Past that point, those users will only be able to play their music as long as they keep using the same computer and operating system. But if they upgrade either hardware or software, they’re out of luck.

Wait, wait. Back up just a bit. Is it possible that Microsoft shutting down MSN Music wasn’t just stupid, but calculated? There’s no question that MSN Music’s shut down has raised the profile of DRM a bit. At this point, could the labels themselves want people soured from DRM so they’re soured from the iTunes store?

Just a crazy conspiracy theory, right?

I’ve been using this iMac for a few weeks, and I’ve noticed an odd melty-plastic smell from time to time. I didn’t associate it with the iMac, though; the top of the iMac was hot, but not unbearably so.

After the weekend, though, the smell was more intense. Bruce found a particular spot on the back panel of it that was uncomfortably hot. Time to investigate.

I downloaded Temperature Monitor and found the power supply was at 81° Celsius (about 178° Fahrenheit). That’s far too hot! I found smcFanControl and turned up the fan speeds, and my iMac’s power supply is runs between 55-58° Celsius (131-136° Fahrenheit). That’s much healthier, and the plasticy smell has almost (but not completely) disappeared. The downside is that the iMac is no longer silent, though I’m pretty sure I can turn the fans down slightly over the next few weeks.

I appreciate that Apple was trying to make my workspace more enjoyable by keeping the volume down, but it turns out the smell of burning plastic is more distracting than the fan noise. I can only imagine being without a computer while the power supply and back panel were replaced would have been even more distracting.

The Macalope: The iPod as scapegoat

…In this case, the implication is that the death of a British Columbia man who was hit by a falling helicopter could have been averted if he hadnt been wearing his iPod.

I just thought I should point out this could be easily solved. When the iPod is turned on, it could show a splash screen that alternates between different safety tips. “Watch for falling helicopters!” could be one, with a black silhouette helicopter. And, of course, at the bottom of the screen is the ubiquitous “Don’t steal music.”

(I wish my vector art skills were up to the task of drawing a helicopter right now.)

Why Microsoft’s Xbox 360 sales milestone isn’t so impressive

…So while Microsoft’s claim that being first will help them win may sound good to corporate ears, the truth is that the Wii is on track to outsell the Xbox 360 rather handily.

Ars has a nice graph of January-March sales for different systems, too.

I’ve read articles on remapping keys on Windows, but here’s a handy command line utility that makes the registry changes for you: Windows Scan code remapper. No idea if this works on Vista, but I’d imagine so. Especially useful for VMware Fusion.

Times, a newspaper-style RSS reader. But my advice? Skip it, unless you want demonstration of how not to do a product roll-out. Despite being a great idea, it feels extremely buggy. Worse, the application nags you so constantly to buy it — starting on the first day — that it’s hard to take what’s there seriously.

It’s difficult to explain how annoying this is, or why it would even be a problem. The best analogy I can come up with is this: Imagine a first job interview where every third sentence from the candidate is “So, are you going to hire me now?” So how long would the interview go on before you showed the candidate the door (or, in this case, the Trash)?

In a cygwin package called (appropriately enough) chere, there’s a tool to add a command for opening a bash prompt from a Windows folder. It’ll even install a cmd here, though not one for PowerShell. (Thanks to Weiqi Gao, for writing up a great post on this.)

Fellow Indiana Jones fans: A nice-looking Indiana Jones icon set from Icon Factory. Some of the designs look like they’re actually practical for day-to-day use, instead of just a “month of Indiana Jones desktop”-type scenario. More sets are coming.

And here I thought it was just a more advanced, more annoying version of cmd (that I’m hoping supports UNC paths¹).

But Microsoft seems to think it’s something else entirely. I’m not sure what, though. But whatever it is, it’s really really freaking dangerous.

Of course, PowerShell did not destroy my computer. That wasn’t the point. The point was that Microsoft’s fear mongering was over the top. There’s no good reason for an installer to recommend that the user close all other programs. As for backups, the user should be doing regular backups anyway. There’s no reason the PowerShell installer in specific should be dangerous.

I find installer text reminding me to do a backup to be an admission that the installer is not safe. If it’s not safe, pull it until you have one that you’re sure is safe. Disclaimers like this might make sense for service packs, but not for installing an additional shell.

1. Oddly enough, bash from cygwin supports UNC paths. [↩]