The H-Bomb (Apple/HP iPod deal)

Great article in Daring Fireball about the HP/Apple deal on the iPod, here's a longish quote from The H-Bomb:

The Digital Music Platform Computer industry platforms exist at very different levels. For example, “Linux” is a very low-level platform — it’s just a Unix-like operating system kernel that can boot computers and provide access to hardware peripherals. KDE and Gnome are desktop GUI platforms that are built on top of the Linux platform. Tivo is another GUI platform, entirely different than a “desktop”, but also built on top of Linux.

Mac OS X and Windows encompass both these layers — low-level operating system kernels that boot computers and control hardware, and high-level graphical human interfaces for users (and APIs for developers to build their own apps).

I think that what Apple has built, with their three-pronged iPod/iTunes/iTMS, is an even higher-level platform, specifically for digital music (and perhaps in the future, digital media).

Platforms exist for different reasons. Low level platforms are perfect for certain tasks. If you run a high-traffic commercial web site, your servers might run nothing but low-level software. Just Linux or BSD, along with software built for Unix-like platforms: Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL. No GUIs. No desktops. Just servers running low-level software, very quickly, and very reliably.

Mom Update Wed 1/14

Spent the morning at the hospital. My mom's situation is still quite critical, however they managed to stablize her overnight. Last night she had a high temperature (104) but it was back to normal today. They discovered a yeast infection in her bloodstream and started treatment for that today. Just now I did a verbal consent for the hospital to replace her central line as the infection control doctor thinks that that may be a source of infection for her (it's been in for over ten days which alone is apparently not a good thing to do).