Apple is going to get rich off of iTunes on Windows. Let me just start with that. I downloaded iTunes for Windows. I've used it on my Mac for awhile and it's basically identical on the PC to its Mac incarnation. And it makes sampling of music, purchasing, and downloading so seamless at such a reasonable price that excuse for pirating music is gone. This makes it so easy and convenient that people will be buying music in vast numbers. It's a win-win situation that I think will eventually...
According to this article at The Register , TabletPC sales are terrible. Which is not surprising at all to me. What is surprising is that they are trying to blame Microsoft for the poor sales. The OEMS basically have 3 main reasons why TabletPCs aren't selling: Cost. Microsoft is over charging for the Tablet PCs version of Windows XP. Marketing. Microsoft isn't marketing Tablet PCs hard enough. Bundling. Microsoft isn't delivering compelling software to make Tablet PCs sta...
What is it with Mac users and their tendency to think that everything was invented on the Mac? I've been seeing this a lot over the past few weeks as features of Longhorn have gotten leaked out. Compositing? MacOS X. XAML? There's an equivalent on Mac too. Name something on Windows and you're told it showed up on the Mac. Which is a pretty tall attitude for people who only recently seemed to have discovered preemptive multitasking or threads. Did Apple "rip off" the idea of preempti...
I'm going to write something more in depth once I get a better feel for Panther (10.3). I like my Mac. It's a fine machine. But Macs, since going to OS X (including 10.3) feel much more sluggish. I also find them very limited in how much you can change them in how they work. If Apple hasn't thought of it, you're not likely to be able to find a tool, freeware or otherwise, that will let you change its behavior. I also find the lack of freeware for it to be a major downside. I buy hundr...
When I first got my iMac I confess to having been quite disappointed. For one thing, MacOS X Jaguar was kind of crummy in my opinion. Mac users tend to be a fanatical lot and as a result tend to live in denial about the short comings of the Mac. It's like they have this unspoken rule not to publicly speak about all the problems Mac users deal with. Not being part of that cult, I had the audacity to point out the short comings here on JoeUser (will put together a list of links shortly to those...
So as I get into Panther (OS X 10.3) I'm increasingly annoyed at the $129 upgrade price. Not that Panther isn't a good upgrade but Apple has pretty much made it clear that it is a specialty shop. You're not just buying a computer, you are buying membership into an elite club. But for most people, cost matters. As a Mac and Windows user, my view is that while the Mac has some nice features, it s not nearly worth the cost involved. I mean come on, $129 for 10.3 from 10.2? That's ridiculous....
Did it just happen one day? That the editors of InfoWorld and PC Week (before it became eWeek), got together and decided that instead of having interesting magazines that they would instead focus on covering only the dullest stuff out there? Was it their goal to transform their magazines from thick, content rich material to being largely pamphlets that resemble more of a specialty Miller Freeman type publication that only a tiny select group would find interesting or useful? Loo...
The skin library file server over at WinCustomize took a hit today when the primary library hard drive died. Luckily, we do regular backups so it's not a total loss but very likely will lose a few files in the process. How many remains to be seen. Most of our stuff uses RAID in redundancy mode but unfortunately, because of the sheer size of the library, it's not really practical (on a budget) to do that. But boy I wish we had that set up tonight. I guess it's better tonight than say Thursday....
So now that Panther (MacOS X 10.3) is out the Mac users are out again trying to convince "pee-cee" users to "Switch". The problem is, Mac advocates have no credibility at this point. They've spent it long ago. People don't like being lied to and the most vocal of Mac fanatics regularly and massively crossed the line between exuberance and outright dishonesty. Anyone who has debated in the OS wars long enough has seen what I'm talking about. Over the years argued that things like pre-emptive m...
The Creative Muvo is a great MP3 player...while it functions. Last night mine died for no apparent reason. I don't even use it that much. It simply stopped working. So I went on-line to see what I could do. Turns out, the Creative Muvo is very unreliable. Many people pointed out that after around 90 days they tend to just crap out. Which is annoying for a $80 product. So scratch one MP3 player. I'll have to look around for a new Mp3 player.
Linux will never make it mainstream on the desktop unless Microsoft does something incredibly stupid. I fought in the trenches of the OS Wars back in the 1990s. During the height of the Microsoft-IBM battle for the desktop with Windows 3.1 vs. OS/2, myself and Dave Barnes from IBM went on the road together demoing OS/2 and OS/2 + Object Desktop to HP, Gateway, Dell, Compaq, and the rest in an effort to get OS/2 pre-loaded. At the time, OS/2 was remarkably better. There was no debate about ...
I don't watch a lot of TV. I just don't have time. So when I do watch TV I want to watch the things I want to watch and not just whatever is on. For that reason, I've been an advocate of PVRs (Personal Video Recorders). 2 years ago, I bought a software PVR called Snapstream. It was a good start but fairly primitive at the time. So I went and got a Tivo and have been quite happy with it since then. But Snapstream has made steady progress on their PVR and rebranded it "Beyond TV&qu...
One thing that's a bit frustrating these days is that it's really hard to make good use of system RAM to improve your performance. In the good gold days of DOS. I could use HyperCache or SmartDrv or some other disk caching program and feel the performance improvements. For instance, in 1992 I had a 386SX with 8 megs of RAM which, back then, was immense. So when in DOS, I'd set SmartDrv to have a 4 meg cache. And when I loaded Windows 3.0, the hard drive barely crunched at all and the system i...
I love my IBM ThinkPad T40. I've been using ThinkPads as my notebook of choice since 1994 when I got a ThinkPad 750 (I think it was). I've had great luck with them. But with this ThinkPad T40, the hard drive just doesn't seem to be quite right. It is slowly dying. Sector by sector, it is degrading. Luckily, I actually do backups on a regular basis so when Windows got wiped out again due to more sectors going bad, I was able to recover my data. But I don't trust it now, I'm going t...
For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the MacOS X "Tiger" controversy (i.e. those of you who are normal with lives!) here's our story so far... On July 28 Apple introduced the new version of MacOS X coming out next year code-named "Tiger" at the big Macintosh developers conference. Included there were these big banners: Plus this cute graphic: Here are the key features of Tiger in a nutshell: Built in good searching iChat AV (video chatting) Dashboard ...