Category: Technology

With a son in the first few months of his life, the time that my wife and I spent going to the cinema has been sadly curtailed.  I don’t like renting DVDs, partly because I hate sitting through adverts for films have no intention of watching, and partly because I hate being told that Piracy Is A Crime.  Every. Bloody. Time.  A patronising message which is made more irritating by the fact that if I had pirated the damn film I wouldn’t have to watch the message or umpteen adverts.

So, at the risk of sounding like a cheap radio commercial, I was delighted to discover that rentals and purchases from the iTunes store are not only reasonably priced but also free from annoyance.  You pay.  You watch.  You aren’t forced to sit through crap.

You confess to having brainwashed your children. Nice.  It won’t work, of course.  Children are independent and they’ll do as they damn well please.  You can’t even stop them from doing something that might harm them later (like drugs for example), so banning them from using products and services (like the iPod and Google) which are way better than anything from Microsoft is somewhat risible.

Of course, whether or not brainwashing works, a better solution would be for Microsoft to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Apple and Google.  If Microsoft can make a better product than its competitors then its competitors will go out of business – after all, who would buy a product from a small company if the big one can do the job at least as well?  I’m not even thinking of search engines or music players any more.  I’m thinking of an operating system – Mac OS X (which you have doubtless also banned your children from using).

Windows is a leviathan.  It commands so much market share that anyone buying a computer would be foolish not to buy Windows – unless there was a competitor at least twice as good.  After all, you’d need a damn good reason to throw away compatibility with the world’s most used OS.  Windows has two such competitors.  My favourite is Mac OS X and its feature set goes way beyond Vista but without the precipitous hardware requirements.  Of course, Mac OS X requires you to have a computer made by Apple – but since you’ll probably need a new computer to run Vista anyway, it’s worth considering.

Some people claim that they don’t want to be locked in to a hardware manufacturer (as if being locked into an operating system is any better).  Okay, I can sort of understand that.  I run Ubuntu on my PC.  I find that it’s far more capable than Windows, more secure and (at least as far as I’m concerned) easier to use.  It looks nicer too, to my eyes, and it’ll run on virtually any computer.  It’s free too.

Some people will still object that they need to run Windows programs.  In most instances, of course, they don’t need to.  Open Office is Microsoft Office compatible (and free too), and there are many other applications that can be used in lieu of those written by Microsoft.  On those rare occasions that a Windows program is required, Crossover will run Windows programs natively on either Mac OS or Linux.

So come on Steve, give me one good reason why your kids – or anyone else for that matter – should use Microsoft products? Oh, and ‘because it’s your company’ isn’t a good enough reason!

Strange as it may seem, I think that Microsoft is being unfairly treated when it’s asked to unbundle parts of Windows in order to comply with European monopoly law.  How would we, as Mac users, feel if the next version of Mac OS X contained no compression software, no web browser, no DVD player or even Quicktime?

That isn’t to say that Microsoft shouldn’t be slapped down firmly for being monopolistic, but the E.U. lawyers should work out exactly why Windows has a monopoly.  It has a monopoly because important bundled applications or frameworks – like Windows Media Player, .Net etc. only work on Windows and on no other platform.  Similarly, the forthcoming Zune will work only with Windows computers.

iPod may currently be dominant, but it isn’t a monopoly because it will work just as well on Windows as it does on the Mac.  Quicktime works exactly the same on Windows as it does on the Mac – DRM and all. Mac OS isn’t a monopoly because, even though it only works on Apple hardware, it doesn’t lock the user into using a particular operating system to use the files it generates.

I sincerely hope that the E.U. spots Zune and forces Microsoft to make it work with the Mac – DRM and all, or forbids its sale.

Deep down, in the depths of my soul, I’m a luddite.  I didn’t like PowerPC when Apple first unleashed that on the world.  I was cold about the shift from NuBus.  OS X seemed to be a disaster. On all these counts, I was wrong.  Apple knew what it was doing, although I’m still not convinced by the switch to Intel.

This time though, I’m certain that an own goal has been scored.  Boot Camp, the technology that allows Mac’s to boot Windows, has to be a bad idea.

If a Windows user buys a Mac and then uses it to run Windows, why should they ever learn to use and love the Mac? If a Mac can run Windows Photoshop, why should Adobe bother to develop an Intel native version of Mac Photoshop?  Why should any developer
develop for Intel Mac? Finally, Apple is a hardware company that just happens to write an operating system.  If fewer people are using its OS, why should bother to spend all that money on continuing development?

I’ve been proved wrong in the past.  I’m not visionary enough to see the wisdom of Apple’s manoeverings.  But I wish they’d stop scaring me and right now I’ve got a sense of impending doom about this.

As someone who is opposed to rampant consumerism, I’m a little perplexed by this site – SmashMyIpod. My view is as follows. If you need something, then buy it. And once you’ve purchased it, use it until it dies of old age. If possible, once it has died, resurrect it and keep on using it. Continue reading “A Little Rant About Consumerism”

There has been litigation, on both sides of the atlantic, to punish individuals who use unsecured wireless networks. What a waste of time – and how unfair for the poor buggers that get caught. Continue reading “WiFi Piracy”

All this fuss about a bit of sex in a 18 rated video game. Ridiculous. Sex is good – it’s fun. I imagine that the scenes in GTA aren’t entirely normal – I imagine that they’re rather twisted. But sod it – as long as the sex being portrayed is consensual then that’s fine by me. I’d far rather that people see sex than that they see one person killing or mutilating another. If GTA should be banned, it should be banned for the violence – not the rumpy pumpy. Continue reading “Grand Theft Auto”

Apple is moving to Intel?  It’s a sad day for so many reasons.  I’ve scratched my head in bewilderment at many of Apple’s crazy moves in the past, and those crazy moves have turned out okay.  I don’t see how this one can amount to anything more than a kick in the nuts to Mac users though.

PowerPC was a great architecture, and competition with it gave Intel a reason to make their processors better.  More importantly, it prevented Windows users from installing OS X, thereby depriving Apple of its important hardware business.

Here’s to the boring ones.
The bland.
The tedious.
The vapid.
The square pegs in the square holes.
The ones who can’t see further than the ends of their noses.

They’re fond of rules.
And they worship Status Quo.
You can yawn at them, agree with them, forget them,
go along with them or be forced to accept them.
About the only thing you can’t do is have an alternative.

Because they keep things the same.
They stagnate. They hold back. They fester.
They decline. They expire.
They hold the human race back.

Maybe they have to be boring.
How else can you stare at Vin Diesel and see art
Or listen to Britney Spears and hear beautiful music?
Or gaze at another country and want to conquer it?

We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them at the boring ones, we see them as a ticket to a fat back hander.

Because the people who are boring enough to the think they can hold the world back, are the ones who inherit the earth.

Apple. Think uniformity.

I was browsing through an old MacUser (16 November 2001) when I came across a letter deriding the iPod as another ‘cube’.  I chortled heartily at this, but my laughter froze in my throat as I read the next letter on the page.  It described the iPod as a ‘poxy Rio clone’, ‘a wasted opportunity’ and unable to ‘outperform my minidisc player’. Unfortunately the shortsighted fool that wrote the letter was me.

I’d like to take this opportunity to eat my words. I love my ‘poxy Rio clone’.  Since I bought mine many of my friends and family have done so too, and they love theirs as well.  I was wrong, and I apologise for my rudeness to Apple. As for my minidisc player, I have no idea where that is. Scrap probably.

I might even remember this humbling lesson and buy a Mac Mini.  Maybe not.  After all, it doesn’t have enough graphics memory and it is just a poxy clone of the Cappuccino PC. Ahem.