Apple has released a cool new aluminum cased laptop today, the Macbook Air. It’s considered an ultra portable laptop, weighing 3lbs with a maximum height of just .75 inches when closed. The Air will be available in two configurations, both of which with will come with the maximum 2GB of ram. The base model has a custom-made Intel Core Duo processor that’s operating at 1.6ghz and includes an 80gb IDE hard drive. The top tier model will come with the same custom Intel chip but the clock speed is bumped to 1.8 GHz. The top model will also include something that has never been seen in an Apple computer, a 64 gb solid state hard drive or SSHD.

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Apple Computer and Zingerman’s: It’s All About the Customer

“…Zingerman’s has grown in a deliberate but purposeful way, expanding in areas where it can control the customer experience. It doesn’t franchise. It doesn’t lend its name to stuff that is not home-grown. It treats its brand like a rare and valuable jewel, pulling it out and sharing it only when its safe and only at appropriate times. It now has a thriving mail-order business. It can control how items are packaged, the presentation, and the consistency of quality of the items delivered. It also opened a restaurant in Ann Arbor, again a venue where they can control the customer experience front-to-back. I am a stickler for customer service. I am willing to pay a premium for excellent service, and get very, very irritated if I am asked to pay a premium price but the service doesn’t hold up its end. When I walk into Zingerman’s I always have a smile on my face because I know that I will get first-class, friendly, intelligent and informed service, every time. Zero variation…”

More here: “Information Arbitrage: Apple Computer and Zingerman’s: It’s All About the Customer”

NYTimes article: “A Corner Deli With International Appeal”

“…Why is Sun joining the Mac porting project? If you look around at conferences and airport lounges, you will notice that more and more people are using Apple notebooks these days. Apple has a significant market share in the desktop space. We are supporting this port because of the interest and activity of the community wanting this port…”

http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/sun_microsystems_engineering_joins_porting

“Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player…” - Steve Jobs

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

After a few days of running into sporadic IP conflicts within one of our sub-nets, it seemed likely that there may be an unauthorized DHCP service running on our network. There are a couple of ways one could troubleshoot such a problem, the first being to disable any authorized DCHP servers and attempt to release and renew the IP address of a workstation within the subnet. (if it renews you’ll have your culprit) This solution wasn’t very appealing nor was doing such a thing during production hours. The other option was spotlighted in this well written blog article by Chip Witt “Hunting a Rogue DHCP Server” Introduced is a command-line tool called DHCPloc that comes with any Windows 2000+ resource kit. The program is easy to use, just enter your IP address and DHCPloc will output information about all DHCP servers responding to DCHP requests from the input IP address. This program allowed us to easily recognize and disable the unauthorized DHCP service. Chip Witt’s article goes into much greater detail and presents some great insight on resolving such issues.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Dec. 14, 2006 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) will introduce a beta version of Adobe Photoshop CS3 software, the next release of the world standard in digital imaging, on Friday, December 15th. Adobe is delivering a widely available Photoshop CS3 beta to enable customers to more easily transition to the latest hardware platforms, particularly Apple’s new Intel-based systems. The beta is available as a Universal Binary for the Macintosh platform, as well as for Microsoft Windows XP and Windows Vista computers. The final shipping release of Adobe Photoshop CS3 is planned for Spring 2007. The software can be downloaded at: http://labs.adobe.com

In creating a new user account I failed to make a user a member of a needed security group. The user called to inquire as to why he was unable to access certain departmental resources after logging on, I sincerely apologized and was able to quickly recognize and fix the problem.

After correcting the issue we realized that making it part of our WRITTEN standard operating procedure for creating new accounts would be a great way to help prevents this from happening in the future.

This kinda sucks. Google is the Micro**** of online video

http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-6124053.html?tag=cnetfd.mt

Hey,

So my Macbook has been randomly shutting down for the last couple of days and Wednesday it happened 6 times while I was using it. Called 1800-SOS-APPLE and after giving the Apple Tech my email address he says “That wouldn’t be Zingerman’s Deli would it?” He proceeds to tell me how much he loves our food and that they eat here whenever they come to visit his in-laws in Dearborn. He also admits to having had a mail order a sandwich kit sent to where he lives in Texas. It was easy to tell that he really meant all of the nice things he had said (this is level 2 tech support mind you) and seemed to carry a lot of enthusiasm for our products. The tech ended up giving me the choice of sending it in for repair or having it replaced with a new one(tough decision right?) It’s cool because they really didn’t need to send me a new machine and it’s totally outside of their warranty obligations to completely replace it. Anyway, it’s nice to have a good customer service experience outside of the COB once in a while, especially with a computer manufacturer.

-Brian