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MacChat: 2009The age of the Twitpocalypse
TEN years ago, when the Windows world was scrambling to head off the looming millennium bug, Mac users just sat back and snickered. Macs already used four-digit years, so there was no need to fear a system crash.
Apple even ran a TV commercial starring the sentient computer HAL from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which said: “It was a bug, Dave. Only Macintosh was designed to function perfectly, saving billions of monetary units. You like your Macintosh better than me, don’t you Dave? Dave?”
Now Mac users have had their comeuppance with a modern day Y2K, but it hasn’t brought down airliners or triggered nuclear armageddon. It’s just been inconvenient for several million Twitter users.
The so-called “Twitpocalypse” has affected several Mac and iPhone/iPod Touch Twitter clients, which run on variants of Apple’s OS X platform.
These include the desktop version of Twitterrific, and both versions of Tweetie. TweetDeck, which runs on Adobe’s AIR platform, was also affected. Bug fixes were quickly issued for Twitterrific and desktop Tweetie, but the fixed version of Tweetie for iPhone/iPod Touch is still awaiting Apple App Store approval.
The Twitpocalypse was triggered by the number of tweets posted on the social networking service exceeding 2,147,483,647 – in maths, the limit of a signed integer.
There are now about three billion tweets, increasing at a rate of more than 150 a second.
Most Twitter apps affected by the Twitpocalypse displayed the regular timeline correctly, but had trouble displaying search results.
While the Twitpocalypse was a minor annoyance compared to the millennium bug, it showed that Mac users are not always immune to flawed code.
Ironically, while the Mac was not threatened by Y2K, the Mac OS is now based on Unix, which had some vulnerabilities to the millennium bug, and faces another threat in 2038.Jobs gets new liver
PLE CEO Steve Jobs is back at work after six months’ medical leave, during which he received a liver transplant, according to reports.
Jobs was spotted on the company’s campus in Cupertino, California, and Apple released a press release in which Jobs touted a million sales of the iPhone 3GS on its opening weekend in the US.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Jobs had received a liver transplant in Tennessee two months ago.
The man largely credited for Apple’s design sensibility had been on medical leave since the start of the year, following dramatic weight loss in 2008 that sparked speculation of a return of the pancreatic cancer he beat in 2004.
Jobs had a rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable, but can require an organ transplant.
It is believed Jobs had the transplant in Tennessee as it has a shorter waiting list than other US states. It is unknown if he is back in a full-time or part-time capacity.
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