Apple 1 computer for sale.
Perhaps the best condition, best documented Apple 1 in existence.

Any Apple 1 is rare but this unit has impeccable provenance and is so clean…it literally may be the best surviving Apple 1.

Provenance:
Included in this sale are the following items to provide complete history and provenance for this unit:

o The original invoice for the sale, dated December 7, 1976. The sales person, Steven, is presumed to be Steve Jobs.

o A letter, typed on plain notebook paper and signed by Steven Jobs. Though undated, the letter refers to sending the buyer a dealer application in January or February, 1977.

o The original packaging in which the computer shipped, with a return address of Steve Jobs’ parents address at the time.

o Photographs of every owner of this unit. The original owner was photographed holding the computer, the next owner did the same and the current owner took his picture with both the system and with Steve Wozniak

(btw, When Steve Wozniak saw this unit he told me that the first batches of Apple 1’s used a brand of chip they later replaced because they blew out easily. He said those chips were on this unit, which is probably why the unit didn’t boot in the mid-80s.)

Interesting that this comes as Xbox sales are declining and PS3 sales climbing. Will this help MS sales because the ban is permanent and users will have to buy a new Xbox or will these users abandon the console?

Yesterday, news broke that Microsoft had banned a massive amount of players from its Xbox Live service which is available on its popular Xbox 360 gaming console. According to reports, the banned players had one thing in common — they had modified their console’s hardware or firmware to carry out unauthorized activity such as installation of an alternate OS, playing out of zone media, or running pirated software.

Initially, the estimates pegged the number of banned users at 600,000. Now CNET is reporting that over 1 million players have been banned from the service. That’s a pretty incredible number as Xbox Live only has 20 million subscribers. That means that approximately 1 in 20 players has been banned, or roughly 5 percent of the service’s total population.

The ban coincided with the release of Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on Tuesday, and many are speculating that the rampant piracy of the game before its release triggered Activision to demand action from Microsoft. Pirated copies were widely floating around torrents sites over the weekend, and players with modified consoles may have taken it out for a spin ahead of release.

Banned machines are showing up on eBay and elsewhere, often without warning they are banned machines.

The late, great science fiction author, Issac Asimov, hawking a miracle of modern technology.

I’m a programmer and I’ve written a few compilers, but maybe my expectations are too high? Here is some PHP code that doesn’t work. But if you report it as a bug as I did they say, “that’s how it’s supposed to work”. I think they think if you document a bug it’s not a bug any more. This is what gives open source a bad name… lack of responsibility.

Among the 100,000-plus applications for the iPhone is one that allows users to “kill” bankers.

The TARP-inspired Bailout Wars app lets iPhone users “take revenge on bankers” by “throwing them into the air, blowing them up, shooting them down and shaking them so hard their clothes fall off, writes American Banker. The point of the game, made by Gameloft and selling for $.99 on iTunes, is to destroy bankers in order to save both the White House (and US taxpayers’ money) from greedy day traders, high risk investors, and finance CEOs.

The game’s description on iTunes reads:

Defend the White House and save the US taxpayers’ money before it gets stolen! It’s time for you to give them what they deserve! [...] It’s your only chance to really take revenge on bankers for the recession they caused [...] Explore many different ways to beat bankers: tap, grab, or shake them in the air. Bailout Wars current has a three-and-a-half star rating on iTunes, with 219 users out of 492 giving the app a five-star rating.

I just hope it works on the iPod Touch.

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Click pic to learn all about it

With support for “18 buttons, an analog joystick, and support for as many as 52 key commands,” it’s for people who think the new Apple Magic Mouse has gone a tad too far the other way. Designed for use with the free Open Office suite, the three extra fingers needed to operate it are, well, extra.

Maybe he’s reading too much into Ballmer’s lack of enthusiasm. Maybe’s Steve’s mellowing. Maybe he was bummed out about having to lay off more people. Maybe he was coming down with swine flu. Or maybe “Window 7 has done quite well” isn’t “quite well” enough.

Shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems to be having trouble finding something nice to say about Windows 7’s launch.

Analysts seem to think Windows 7 has done quite well, but the man who knows all the figures seems to be keeping uncharacteristically quiet.

When hacks at ComputerWorld asked Ballmer how Windows 7 was doing, he said “er… its fantastic… er, in Japan.”

“It is helping to spur PC sales… um… in Japan. We’ve had a great response… in Japan. The first ten days were bigger than the first ten days of XP or Vista or any other Windows launch that we have done… in Japan.”

True he was talking to a Japanese news conference, but it is rare that the great man is that specific. If it was really doing well in Japan and everywhere else we would expect him to start waving his arms, flinging chairs and shouting, “I rule the world, baby!”

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Microsoft is shocked to find racy content in “Family Guy” special | Los Angeles Times — What idiots.

Less than two weeks after announcing that it would be the sole sponsor of Fox’s November 8 “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show,” Microsoft has pulled out.

MACFARLANE According to Variety’s Mike Schneider, who broke the story, everything was humming along just fine until the folks at Microsoft went to the taping of the special last week and were shocked, shocked to find racy humor and tasteless jokes about deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest.

The brave and the foolish. My 5 year old XP laptop is dying today so I went to Fry’s to get a new laptop. I was thinking that the Vista laptops would be heavily discounted but the Windows 7 computers were both newer and cheaper. Generally I don’t buy a Microsoft OS until at least service pack 1. But I’m taking a chance here so let’s see how it works. I’m using my Acer netbook to write this and going to do the install live and blog about it while it happens. So if it works then that’s what I’ll write. If it doesn’t then it gets slammed. So refresh this article today (Oct 24) because this is a live review.

Just out of idle curiosity, how many apps are in Microsoft’s Marketplace app store? I can’t tell since apparently you can’t get to it via their website without a Windows-based phone. Unlike that other company.

Comforting anecdotes in health care news that we are paying an arm and a leg for. I wonder how many go unreported.

The maker of a life-saving radiation therapy device has patched a software bug that could cause the system’s emergency stop button to fail to stop, following an incident at a Cleveland hospital in which medical staff had to physically pull a patient from the maw of the machine.

The bug affected the Gamma Knife, a device resembling a CT scan machine that focuses radiation on a patient’s brain tumor while leaving surrounding tissue untouched. A patient lies down on a motorized couch that glides into a chamber, where 201 emitters focus radiation on the treatment area from different angles. The patient wears a specialized helmet screwed onto his skull to ensure that his head doesn’t move and expose the wrong part of the brain to the machine’s pinpoint tumor-zapping beams.
[...]
When the hospital called the company that makes the Gamma Knife, it learned that there was a “known software bug problem” affecting the unit’s couch sensors. Known, anyway, to the company, Stockholm-based Elekta AB.

“Elekta was aware of the software ‘bug’ at the time of the December 2008 event and had implemented actions to correct the ‘bug’ in a future software release,” says Thomas Valentine, director of quality assurance and regulatory affairs for the Elekta’s U.S. arm, in an e-mail.

Since then, he adds, “The ‘bug’ has been corrected in software upgrades that have been implemented to all of the affected sites in the U.S. The U.S. NRC was notified of the completed status of software upgrades to correct the identified ‘bug’.”

We don’t know why “bug” is in quotes; surely this wasn’t a feature.

And then there was this:

The chief executive of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center said Thursday that he regretted the “circumstances” that subjected 206 patients to radiation overdoses and laid out reforms made since the hospital discovered that a CT scanner had been set erroneously for 18 months.

Slashdot – October 17, 2009:

“New Canadian anti-spam and anti-spyware legislation is scheduled for a key vote on Monday. Michael Geist reports that the copyright lobby has been pushing to remove parts of the bill that would take away exceptions which currently allow spyware to be installed without authorization. ‘The copyright lobby is deeply concerned that this change will block attempts to track possible infringement through electronic means.’ There have also been proposals to extend the exemptions granted to telecom providers to include the installation of programs without the user’s express consent, which Geist says will ‘leave the door open to private, surreptitious surveillance.’”