The Big Think

“Windows 7 is a ‘minor point-type of release, as opposed to a major update or rewrite.’ Memory footprint for the kernel proved eerily similar to that of Vista as well. ‘In fact, as I worked my way through the process lists of the two operating systems, I was struck by the extent of the similarities…In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance. In other words, Microsoft’s follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.’”

Hey, there’s always OS X!

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Is Intel considering switching its 80,000 internal computers over to Macs? Maybe.

Last week a power surge brought down the whole home automation system. I managed to get it up and creaking again, but the hard drive was starting to hiss and smoke. It was obviously time for us to replace the thing and get the house up to date.

Giles let us use one of his three friend’s and family discounts on a brand new Mac Mini (Thanks, G!). I ordered it last thursday and it arrived 20 hours later on friday, even though I had chosen free shipping. Within a day I had up and running and happily loading movies and other content onto it. A day later I plugged it into our (analog) TV and installed/configured our home automation software (Xtension) on it. Unfortunately, the new machine comes with Leopard (OS 10.5), and Xtension isn’t fully compatible with Leopard yet, so there were some fairly hilarious and debilitating bugs with the setup. After I paid my upgrade fee for Xtension, I asked the one of the co-writers (the inestimable James Sentman) if he maybe had an alpha build of Xtension I could test. Boy! Am I glad I asked. I installed the alpha an it’s never run better. The HA machine has been rock-solid stable and doesn’t have the quirks that the older Xtension did on Leopard. The Mini is incredibly powerful and doens’t even blink when I ask it to run the HA machine, compress a movie, download content from Miro, and play back a hi def stream, all while hosting music and doing a few other things- simultaneously. And this is the low end machine. I got an Apple wireless keyboard and the bluetooth mighty mouse so now I can sit back on the couch and surf or watch a movie from the hard drive. Granted, the screen on our 28″ analog TV is only 28″ and very low res, and we’ll rectify that once prices drop a bit more, but it’s a game-changing thing for us to have easy access to so much content.

The other great thing about the switch is that the home automation system is much more reliable than it was before. The old system was relegated to the corner of an upstairs room and sometimes the signals didn’t get to the computer. The new system is relegated to the exact opposite corner of the house (downstairs corner by the TV), but for some reason signals seem to propagate much better. I haven’t had nearly as many collisions or failed triggers as before. We’ve been through several nights with the system watching over us and so far (finger’s crossed) we haven’t had any lights go on in the dead of night. I think I killed those logic errors several years ago.
Eventually I’d like to speed the system up by getting a wireless antenna so the motion detector signals don’t have to clog up the power lines, but that’s somewhere down the road. Oh, and the mini’s paltry 80 gig hard drive will be cleared up once we get a ginormous firewire drive. I’d love to get a dual terabyte (mirrored) drive, but those’re still out of the price range. I’d hate to get anything less than a 750 because we’ll be filling it up too soon (still don’t have the pictures or music on the mini). How much storage do we really need? About 50% more, it seems. I think in the meantime I’ll look for a cheap ATA to Firewire enclosure and repurpose an old hard drive. Enclosures are only $20-$30 and I can put a lot of music in the 160 gig that I have in the loose drive.

So Christmas came early to our house. Erin loves being able to surf on our TV, and getting rid of that noisy machine upstairs has been a boon. With so much power in the Mini I’m looking for ideas for ways to use it. I’d appreciate any suggestions.

So Comp USA is going out of business. I wandered in there yesterday and spent an hour looking for a decent bluetooth mouse. Stupid me. I decided to save ten bucks and get an RF mouse with a USB dongle. Unfortunately, I got it home, opened the package, and discovered the killer: “Maximum range 3 feet”. Bummer. I need a range of about 12 feet. Stamped all across the receipt: All sales final, no returns. There goes $27. I’m going to go back in today and plead my case with the manager, offering up a win-win. Let me exchange this and pay the difference for a more expensive mouse. Hope it works.

UPDATE: The enlightened manager at Comp USA heard me out. His reply was “so what you want to do is spend MORE money with us, and all I have to do is bend the “no returns” policy? I’d be stupid not to do that.” I didn’t have to give him my big rehearsed spiel or anything. Very cool of him. He actually said “yeah, lots of businesses would stick to the letter of the law, but that’d be dumb.”

So I bit the bullet, applied the $27 to the Apple wireless Mighty Mouse, and now I can operate the Mac from 30 feet away. Erin’s used the wired Mighty Mouse for a year on the iMac and loves it. I can see why.

Went to lunch at Apple with Giles today and talked Apple, tech, and computer lust. He just got a new Mac Mini and is using it as a central hub for all of his music and movies. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. He showed me his friends and family discount on a new Mini and I aaaaalmost pulled the trigger. But I decided to be responsible and pass. Soon, though. I really would like a Mini running as the home automation server (to replace the 7 year old G3/333) as well as doing over-the-air HD recording and compression and acting as a movie/photo/music storage center for the whole house.

What I did do is purchase the newest version of iWork. It was only $55 with Giles’ F&F discount, which made it easy. I bought iWork about 18 months ago after taking a good look at it. It promised to replace Word/Appleworks/Pagemaker. I had been doing all those setups and layout stuff for CD’s, etc, in a bunch of different programs and was looking for a way to consolidate my efforts. iWork 1.0 did a good job of this but was still a version 1.0 release (some minor annoyances). After looking at 2.0 I jumped. Apple has added a VERY consolidated and powerful spreadsheet program as well as made the layout program (Pages) more “Word-like”. You can still do all the cool layout stuff (see here), but now you can choose to just do word processing without going through the layout layer. I imagine that I will be doing all of my word processing, layout, and spreadsheets in iWork from now on. Too bad I don’t do any presentations. Keynote is supposed to rock.

By the way, I just heard on a podcast that 60% of laptop users are reporting that they will be purchasing a Mac laptop for their next machine. 60%! This jibes with Apple’s laptop market share increase lately. They’ve gone from 12% to 17% of all laptops sold in the past few quarters. We have a couple of friends who have converted over and they are thrilled to have finally made the switch. It’s true- once you go Mac, you never go back. So what are you all waiting for?

Clockwork Pismo. Awesome. Hmm… I have a Pismo….

David Pogue in the new musical iPhone.

Street magic with the new iPhone.

I could really use one of these. The new Apple i-Bal.

USA Today reports that Apple’s market share has more than doubled since 2004. Up from 3.2% to 7.6% Hooray!

The new 128 bit file system architecture from Sun known as “zfs” is big. Really big. Really, really big. A 128 bit addressing space allows us to access and keep track of a LOT of data. How much? More than we’ll ever need. Trust me on that.

Okay, don’t trust me. Read this article instead. If you stacked 300gb hard disks over the entire surface of the Earth to a depth of 2.5 million miles, you would just be touching the extent of the address space. To power this many drives would take the perfect conversion of all the planet’s oceans to energy. This would provide enough power for 4 months.

Plus, ZFS has other cool things like automatic Raid arrays and storage pooling-where you just toss another drive in and that goes into the “pool” of available space transparently. Any way you look at it, ZFS looks freaking amazing. And it’s rumored to be coming to OS X.

more here.

A whole slew of new Mac ads.

Old Billy Boy has gone off his meds:

In a Vista-pimping interview with Newsweek yesterday, Bill Gates appears to be taking off the gloves with an all-out attack on the Mac. When questioned about accusations of copying Mac OS X features, Bill began accusing Apple of the exact opposite, and he also postulated that “maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing.” While he is of course referring to the 2003 demonstration of Longhorn, this isn’t even the half of it. Bill also tried to turn their reputation for swiss-cheese security around on Apple, claiming:

“Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.”

uh….riiiiight

It’s marketing 2.0! It doesn’t matter how outrageous the claim, Just trumpet the opposite loudly enough and get enough uninformed people to believe it and it’ll eventually be true! Or at least you’ll get a lot of clueless consumers to think it might be true. Geeze, louise, is this guy serious!?!?

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more here

An interview with Ellen Feiss, the mac Switcher from five years ago. Fun and interesting to read how the ad changed her life and what she’s doing now.

Didn’t know they had them (the ads, that is) over there.
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End those embarrassing “Zune Moments“

…you might think I would be predisposed to love Vista, Microsoft’s newest version of Windows, which was scheduled to be released to consumers at the end of January. And indeed, I leaped at the opportunity to review it. I couldn’t wait to finally see and use the long-delayed operating system that I had been reading and writing about for more than three years. Regardless of widespread skepticism, I was confident that Vista would dazzle me, and I looked forward to saying so in print.

Ironically, playing around with Vista for more than a month has done what years of experience and exhortations from Mac-loving friends could not: it has converted me into a Mac fan.

From Uninspiring Vista

By the way, Apple’s Q4 results are out, and they’re goooood.

Hilarious

Time Magazine reports on the new Apple iPhone:

Apple’s new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority…

…To Jobs’s perfectionist eyes, phones are broken. Jobs likes things that are broken. It means he can make something that isn’t and sell it to you for a premium price…

…When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. “I think there’s almost a belligerence—people are frustrated with their manufactured environment,” says Ive. “We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use.” In other words, when our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.

This last paragraph sums up why so many people love Apple products. It’s not the cool-aid, or the famed Reality Distortion Field. It’s the fact that, to a far greater extent than any other computer company (or personal electronics manufacturer, for that matter) Apple products just work. Intuitively, painlessly, seamlessly, and well. And that’s why so many people are switching.

5-year-old Mac OS X compared to the new Windows Vista. Quotes:

Hidden behind all of this hoopla, however, is the fact that as much of an improvement Vista is over XP, its main competitor, Mac OS X, still stacks up really well — and even tops Vista in several important areas…

Windows is very eager to tell you what’s going on. Constantly. Plug something in, and you get a message. Unplug something and you get a message. If you’re on a network that’s having problems staying up, you’ll get tons of messages telling you this. It’s rather like dealing with an overexcited Boy Scout…who has a lifetime supply of chocolate-covered espresso beans…

To put it simply, you can work on a Mac for hours, days even, and only minimally need to directly use the OS. With Vista? The OS demands your attention, constantly…

I’ve yet to see anything in Vista that blows away the Mac OS, even a version of the Mac OS that’s over a year old. Microsoft still can’t manage to make something simple and easy to use. Vista reeks of committee and design by massive consensus, while OS X shines from an intense focus on doing things in a simple, clear fashion and design for the user, not the programmer.

If you’ve never given the Mac a chance, why not? I have many, many friends (from musicians to quantum physicists to computer geeks) who have made the jump to Mac and, without exception, they are all glad they did. Come on…. everybody’s doing it.