I’m sick of Apple’s snobbery. As an AAPL stockholder and customer, I’m fed up with Apple alienating and insulting PC users.
Now, I’m not a Mac-hater; far from it. In fact, I’m a recent re-convert, having come back to the Mac platform after leaving it for Windows 95 when Microsoft was turning itself around based on Bill Gates’ long-overdue realization that the web was the future. Now, I’m primarily a Mac user. Up until just over a year ago, I was primarily a Windows user. Continue reading
A hearty laugh followed by a short moment of pondering followed my reading of Bill Gates’ comments in the obligatory Newsweek interview upon the release of Microsoft Vista. In the interview, Bill is asked a series of questions about the inevitable comparisons between Windows Vista and Apple’s OS X operating system, and Apple’s very pointed advertisement wherein Apple implies that “PC” (played by John Hodgman) will need major surgery to run Vista.
Newsweek: How about the implication [in the Apple ad] that you need surgery to upgrade?
Gates:Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like itâ??s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.
What? Has Bill taken a page from that bumbling fumble mouthed President of ours? Go back and read Gates’ response aloud; it sounds like a line from a Ben Stiller movie.
Let’s break down that response to try to decode Bill’s answer.
…we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done.
Erm. Yes sir, that’s pretty much the point of the Apple spot. Microsoft’s done a commendable job (hell, a remarkable one with the release of Vista) of “letting” their customers upgrade their hardware.
Oh, wait, maybe Bill means Microsoft’s done a better job of allowing users to update their OS on their hardware. No, that can’t be what he means; during the past five years nary a single new version of Windows for the desktop was released, yet Apple introduced exactly FIVE new OS releases.
You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade.
Uh, yeah. Yup. That’s pretty much what the ad is saying.
It seems Bill’s agreeing with the overall premise of the ad, so what’s with the overly defensive reaction?
…I don’t know why Apple is acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say?
Well, I think Apple’s trying to say that an existing PC will need major surgery to support Vista.
There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.
There isn’t? Then what the hell are you talking about, Bill?
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
I’ll admit I’m unfairly targeting Vista, but in this day and age, there’s no excuse for this sort of error message and its mumbly-crumbly error text (“might be useful if…”). Might be useful if Error 0x8000FFFF meant anything to the operator. Continue reading
The energy saver preference panel in Mac OS X offers a simplistic approach to managing energy saving settings, such as sleep time for the computer and disks. A user might think that by deselecting “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible”, the drives would be prevented from spinning down. This is not, however, true.
As everyone with an external FireWire, USB or internal RAID array knows, these disks will spin down after 5 minutes of being idle, regardless of whether the aforementioned check box is deselected.
What is a computer user to do when confronted by this wholly unexpected (and dare I say, ‘illogical’) situation? We’ll use Mac OS X’s UNIX underpinnings to change this behavior, using the pmset command to set all drives to never spin down (no, that’s not ecologically friendly). Continue reading
On January 2nd 2007, I accepted a position as Director of Online Technology at Northern Kentucky University’s College of Informatics. This role is exciting from the standpoint that the College is brand new, fusing multiple diverse disciplines with a wide range of technologies, as well as because of the disjointed state of their current online presence.
The College was formed by integrating three distinctly separate departments from other colleges at
NKU: Information Systems (now called Business Informatics), Computer Science and Communication. The departments are building new programs that embrace and leverage the promise of curricula that span the wide range of concepts, topics, techniques collectively called informatika (Mid-20th century. < information, after Russian informatika, nearly synonymous in the United States with Information Systems, but with far greater emphasis on cross discipline application.).
I was drawn to the College from Colorado because I agreed 100% with the reorganization of the three departments. It’s about time that public higher ed institutions realize there are no distinct lines drawn between the various users and developers of technology; the past 20 years have shown us that! Most higher education institutions still cling to the tired Loosenit Alliance of Kingdoms model wherein computer science is housed in a math or engineering college, information systems is housed in a business college, and communication disciplines are in a college of letters/arts, and never shall they meet. Ridiculous. These institutions are missing out on the very potent synergy that these producers of content, managers of content, and developers of content management and manipulation systems witness in the real world. Consider the convergence of computers, television and the web as an example.
The big initial project is rebuilding the online presence of the College, which currently consists of a collection of eight or so distinct sites, none with a common design nor cohesive writing voice. It is no small task! Interestingly, the University is redefining their online presence as well, so I suspect there will be bi-directional ramifications that impact how this project will be managed and will progress.
I plan to blog about the progress I make on this project, so stay tuned.
Today Apple has announced a new multifunction quad-band GSM+EDGE hand-held phone, incorporating Wi-Fi, a wide-screen video player, with MP3 and AAC music player. It automatically senses whether it is held in portrait or landscape mode. The phone itself sports a 3.5-inch screen with 160 pixels per inch (ppi). The entire face is LCD, so all but one “home” button are in software. Apple claims the device is thinner than any other phone at 11.6 mm. (Photos included) Continue reading
Parallels release yesterday of a new beta (build 3094) further blurs the distinction between rival operating systems. With the new release, Windows applications appear independently in the Mac OS X dock, and even in the application switcher. Better still, Windows XP apps can be dragged to a permanent spot on the dock, and when clicked, will launch Parallels, boot Windows XP, and then launch the application. Continue reading
Reader Mista Carruth threw in some good trash after I took out the garbage on Parallels’ fantastic new beta of their Macintosh VM. Apple continues to deny that they’ll introduce a virtualization scheme at the OS level. Of course, that means nothing. No doubt Apple has a master plan, and perhaps this is it. Continue reading
A XSS worm is spreading like wildfire through MySpace, infecting user accounts and modifying the profile and pages by replacing links. Like most cyber attacks, the MySpace worm relies upon a combination of approaches. This one is based in Javascript, CSS, HTML and uses Apple’s QuickTime component as a supporting vehicle.
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Want the freedom to place USB devices anywhere in a room? Imagine putting your scanner on a shelf behind you, your printer in a cabinet, and your camera, well, anywhere. Sick of cabling up your laptop to multiple devices? Now you can plug in a single USB “key” and connect wirelessly, at an amazing 480Mbps, to all your USB devices.
Sounds like the ultimate pitch. In many ways, it is.
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