It looks like Apple isn’t going to ship the Flash plugin by default on the Mac anymore. Not just the new MacBook Air’s, but all new Macs. They claim it’s about technical issues that’s a little absurd. I can understand the iPhone/Flash war – Flash sucks on mobile devices – but dropping it from the default installed base? Making users go to the Adobe website to download and install Flash themselves? Are you kidding me?

This is going too far. I can’t see anything in this other than spite on Apple’s part, which isn’t good business.

A few days ago I ran across a story about a group of novelests who wanted to write a truly scary, horror novel about vampires. Not the sparkly ones that are so popular these days, but real vampires. The author’s website told me that I could get the novel from Amazon as an eBook for $2.99, and truly, that was the only way to get it. They weren’t going through the normal publishing/distribution chain – everything was through Amazon.

They also said not to worry, as there was an easy way to get the Amazon eBook translated into whatever format you like.

So, I purchased the novel. I read the first few chapters on the Kindle for iPhone application, and while it was perfectly serviceable for reading text, I couldn’t stand using it. The text displays just fine, but the formatting is a little odd, the adjustments you can make to the font and the page color weren’t there. I don’t see easy ways to set bookmarks or even see what page number you are on. So, I set about translating the eBook from Amazon’s .azw file format to an .epub that I could load into iBooks.

Quickly, I had to contact Amazon’s customer support, as the instructions listed on the author’s site didn’t work, and Amazon’s help documentation didn’t give my any relief. In short, I was trying to get the “transfer by computer” option to work, so I’d have the .azw file I could mess with. After three emails back and forth between the Amazon Customer Service group, I finally got a definitive answer:

As explained by one of our previous colleagues the option “transfer via computer” is available only for people who possess a Kindle device and are out of the wireless coverage area. For Kindle applications you can download the content from your Manage Your Kindle page.

So, the author was misinformed, and the documentation wasn’t clear. The only way to get the novel readable outside a Kindle is to buy a Kindle. I know this is only over $2.99 – which is a pretty small sum – and when I emailed the authors, they had me sorted out within 24 hours. (Thanks, Blake Crouch!) But I leave the experience with Amazon feeling cheated and with an unpleasant taste in my mouth. I’m half tempted to shoot the authors $10.00 to tempt them to consider other distribution methods. I’m also amused that Amazon, a company that bills itself as the “Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company”, has a customer support mechanism that prevents you from replying easily. They make you enter your support issues on the web, but send replies from “an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.” Stay classy, Amazon.

Now, to register an account on this blog, you’ll need a working OpenID. Don’t have one? There’s a huge number of OpenID providers, and you likely already have one. This will cut down on spammers registering, I hope.

The D7000 is now in the hands of the public. Unlike Chase Jarvis, the public in this case consists of the pixel-peeping fanatics on flickr, who have no problem posting really really boring shots in multiple ISO settings so we can see how the camera performs. And boy does it ever. Hi1 (ISO 12,800) looks better than ISO 1600 on my D200. ISO 25,600 even looks alright as long as it’s not shown full size. What really gets me – there is still color definition at this insane levels. At ISO 1600 on my D200, color is fading, fast. All of this makes me want to order a D7000 right now. But I’ll hold out for as long as I can. I’m sure the D700 replacement is going to be nuts.

So the last post wasn’t very clear – I went out today and purchased one of the new AppleTVs. The tiny black shiny ones that don’t have internal hard drives and supposedly run iOS. Very cool devices, apart from that lack of volume control thing.

So, it looks like you can’t control the volume on the new AppleTV from the Apple-supplied remote, or from the Remote application on your iPhone/iPod Touch. Seriously, Apple? I mean… it’s like you want us to use more than remote.

I’m always amused when I come across proof that long-held assumptions in the tech world are wrong. Today’s amusement comes from the Battle Against Any RAID {Four,Five}, aka, BAARF. These guys have been down on parity setups since June of 2003, back when 120 GB drives were HUGE. They even have a good writeup of RAID5 vs RAID10. The tl;dr version is: RAID5 is almost never worth it for anything high-end, and RAID5 isn’t as reliable as you think. Considering the number of times I’ve seen standalone RAID5 arrays lose all data… yeah, not so much.

This is backed up by other, less inflammatory people. Robin Harris, StorageMojo wrote about the usable lifetimes of RAID5 and RAID6. Google has put out an academic paper on the topic of Unrecoverable Read Errors making RAID less and less useful as time goes by.

If you’re using RAID5 as primary storage, make sure you have good backups.