Nosce te ipsum

A welcome surprise awaited the Mac community this morning as the Apple website went dark, or more accurately black as Apple rolled out a new version of the site as they officially announced the pending arrival of the new Mac OS X Tiger - now scheduled for Friday April 29th 2005. In addition, they announced the official pricing scheme with single user copies priced at $129 while keeping the family pack pricing at $199.

It would be an understatement to say that there has been a lot of anticipation surrounding this release and it looks like Apple is planning their usual Friday night release party which is always an interesting event. The new OS looks like yet another solid release with each subsequent version making the Mac platform one incredibly interesting place to be. I can't say that I know of a many Windows users who are even remotely jazzed about the eventual release of Longhorn yet there is certainly a buzz in the air about Tiger.

I guess from the users perspective, every single Microsoft Windows update that I've ever been a part of was quite honestly, a pain in the ass with no huge benefit for your troubles. Yet with each new Mac OS X release, things generally run faster and better while Apple includes 200+ new features with this release with many of those new features being the kind of thing that you really do use in your day to day work. I'm excited to see how Tiger performs on my Dual G5 2.5 with the 30" Cinema display. Sounds like a good excuse to invest in a few more gigs of ram.

Thanks to clevescene.com for this great piece about an utterly disturbing story about the boys from Redmond. It is amazing to me that this kind of thing is allowed to happen and that they can actually get away with it. Huge props to David Zamos who took up the good fight and flat out did the right thing. His courage is remarkable and I hope that this story really gets a lot of press and exposes this extremely seedy side of Microsoft.

From the story:

The only thing setting him apart from the other late-night crammers is that his notebook isn't filled with study guides. It's overflowing with documents from the federal lawsuit Microsoft brought against him on December 21.

For the past four months, Zamos has been fighting four high-powered attorneys. They claimed he violated trademark and copyright laws by selling two unopened pieces of software on eBay for $203.50.