Seven Generational Ruminations

I have been using Mac's at home for several years now. The freedom from viral infections and the idiotic configuration rigamaroles that come with Windows has been very liberating. The "it just works" mentality is fabulous.

But .. Apple has switched to the Intel processors (hmm.. I wonder where I can get an Intel Inside sticker?) and are working on this Boot Camp software that lets one dual boot Windows. Which leads to conversations one thought would never happen, such as discussing the C: drive on a Mac.

Here's an interesting question ... suppose police capture a terrorists laptop and they want to get into the laptop to extract plans and other documents? Suppose the laptop is rigged so the file system is encrypted meaning the police can't get through the encryption? Suppose there's a ticking bomb, and the plans for the bomb are in the laptop?

Well, to be honest I haven't upgraded to Tiger (10.4.x) yet. As this guy Upgrade to Mac OS X Tiger says, I use this computer "all the time" and it's what runs my business. But he offers a very promising upgrade route.

Microsoft has a long history of copying ideas from elsewhere. I've been watching them for years, and have yet to see them come up with an inventive idea. Oh, wait, they have a visual effect for tooltips which has them "unfurl" from top-to-bottom, that's probably a true invention by Microsoft. Okay, they've had one minor original idea. In particular they seem fond of copying ideas from Apple -- in fact, its well understood that Windows was developed because Bill Gates saw the Mac and got scared and told his people he wanted something like that.

I started using Mac's a few years ago as an anti-vote against the evils of Microsoft. As a longtime professional geek, it seemed that OS X as "Unix with a pretty face" with high quality web and multimedia applications was the perfect system for me. Especially as they offered zero virus problems (spyware hadn't been unleashed yet, but Mac OS X also has none of them either) and zero hassles with strange quirky incompatibilities.

So far it's been fine but for one thing. Apple's focus has moved squarely to the iPod market.

A long time ago I had a dozen PC's running various of the x86 operating systems, including Windows, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. A dozen computers all at once. Yup, I was real hardcore.

Why? I don't really remember, but I learned one important thing. The typical PC hardware sucks big time.

Over the summer hell froze over, but we didn't notice it. First Apple announced they would switch to the Intel processor line for their future computers. Second they announced a mouse with multiple buttons. I swear, the world didn't collapse, though the seriousness of hurricane season this year may make one step back and ponder a bit.

Anyway ...

It's interesting watching the backlash against Microsoft. More and more people are getting fed up with the security problems and more with Microsoft's systems.

Mad as hell, switching to Mac (By Winn Schwartau, Network World, 05/23/05)

Even though I'm a security guy going on 22 years now, my day-to-day work is pretty much like everyone else's. I live on laptops and use my desktops at home and the office for geeking and experimenting. My two day-to-day laptops (two, for 24/7 backup) are my business machines. I don't need them to do a whole lot - except work reliably, which is why I am fed up with WinTel.

He goes on to describe what he wants from his computers, and to list out the reasons why WinTel systems just aren't cutting it.

Hum, at my job I still have to deal with Windows.

I inherited a Sony Viao laptop that I wrote about earlier. Since it's an inherited computer, there's some files left over. Over three hours ago I started the process to delete those files. And, uh, three hours later it's still going through the files deleting them all.

This is completely impossible to believe, but it's true.

How To: Hacking the Linksys NSLU2 (By Jim Buzbee – August 10 2004)

Linksys Storage Link for USB 2.0 Disk Drives NSLU2 asin: B0001FSCZO