Geek Wednesday: A New Vista Yawns

Starting...theWOW ...Wow... oww... ow... ow... owgh...

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that dull echo you faintly heard Monday night and Tuesday morning was the sound of the Vista release parties—half a billion dollars' worth of marketing glitz met with relative silence—where, according to the geek press, one might have found more reporters than customers attending. On the east coast, in New York:

the launch itself was a quiet affair in a midtown CompUSA store (the chain had organized midnight events at several of its stores), where it seemed like there were just as many reporters and camera crews as there were customers hoping to take home a copy of Vista.

...And even where Steve Ballmer was gracing the retail stage, the indifference was only cloaked by the presence of reporters:

The event, ostensibly aimed at showing the retail excitement around the new products, drew a crush of reporters.

That made the considerably smaller number of store customers at 10 a.m. PST on Tuesday nearly as popular as Ballmer, with video crews lining up to get their thoughts on the new software.

C-Net concludes its coverage of the big event with two warnings: Don't buy Vista for the security; and Don't delete XP. Wow.

Here at the Donohue Camp for Unemployed Geeks, I spent a few minutes Monday night removing XP from my MacBook. Honest, I didn't even realize the timing of what I was doing until much later. It's just that I wasn't using those precious 12GB of hard drive space, and finally decided to re-run Boot Camp and remove the partition (that's all you have to do to get rid of a Windows install on a Mac, by the way: it takes about five minutes and the Mac then restarts like a rocket, as if it had just thrown a gorilla off its shoulder). Then I saw the C-Net poll featured in this graphic. My only question about those results is: "where are the Linux users represented?" (for more on that, see below).



So much for Vista, except for...um...one more thing. About three months from now, or even less, Mac OS X Leopard arrives to take another bite out of XP/Vista; after a year in which sales of the Intel Macs helped shoot the value of Apple stock well beyond Dell's.

Curiously, the only question mark for Apple's future is another really stupid, Martha Stewart-style piece of corporate greed. The Apple stock dating scandal is yet another example of how wealth can turn smart people into absolute idiots. If Steve & Co. survive that bit of folly, their products and their geekery will only grow in popularity, even--gasp--in the enterprise realm, where MS dominance is already being weakened by another UNIX-based OS, Oracle-Red Hat. Gartner is already calling this one for Larry Ellison, and the uncertainty over Vista will only make it easier for Oracle. Your average enterprise desktop lacks standalone video, sound, and sufficient RAM to run Vista, and the cash required to upgrade thousands of boxes to accommodate Vista will be nixed by most corporate bean counters.

But people like having MS-friendly hardware and software, and Red Hat might not be the best solution for many. Enter the Mac Mini running off an xserver network, with windows XP, UNIX compatibility, PERL, Apache, Java, you name it, the Mac can now run it in 64-bit mode on Intel-powered hardware.

I know it sounds kooky, and I don't pretend to claim that Apple will take significant market share away from MS next year or the year after that. But 5 years down the line, Red Hat and Apple combined could account for 40-50 per cent of the enterprise IT base; and Microsoft resorting to its old market dominance tricks will only accelerate that trend.

The amazing piece to this Vista release is how Gates and his cronies could have missed the obvious, which is that this OS will further endanger their stranglehold on IT in the enterprise realm. But in corporate America, it is as in corporate government: dissent is considered treason, even—or especially—if it contains truth that will help the company (or the republic). Thus, executive row lines everyone up and delivers the edict: you will aggressively market this impactful new product (note to all corporate dweebs: "impactful" is NOT a word); and if you have any questions, there's the door and here's your pink slip.

______________________

Finally for this Geek Wednesday, a few more gems from my Webby Award reviewing pile.

Activism Down Under: This is a terrific site with a focus, spirit, and research base that makes it the equal of any MoveOn or AfterDowningStreet on this hemisphere. I've now got it bookmarked, and I would recommend you do too.

The Global Dialogue Center is another activism site, but with a more highbrow image. However, once you get into the guts of this site, you'll find audio and text content from the likes of John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man), Dr. Masaru Emoto (The Hidden Messages in Water), and a memorial to Viktor Frankl.

I also went through a few science sites, and this one stood out: BBC's Science of Memory. Take the test yourself and see how you do; you'll learn a lot in the process.

And if you'd like to learn about population and living standard trends on a global, 3-D matrix that offers a lot of perspective, try Google's Gapminder tool.

Now as long as I'm not painfully employed for the moment, I'll probably have lots of time to survey more Webby entrants, so there may well be more to come of these.

One last note to all our readers: January brought us 2,000 unique visitors and some 14,000 pageviews (one of these Geek Wednesdays, we may take some time to explain how to accurately interpret web usage statistics, which is a wildly twisted and abused metric, especially in the corporate realm). For us, that's a really solid month, and I'd like to once more thank you folks for coming by and reading our stuff. I'd probably do this on a deserted island with not a soul to see it, because I'm just that kind of nuts about writing, but knowing that you're all out there makes it a lot more fun.

Geek Wednesday: Stevie's Wonder

Santa must be a Republican, because I didn't get a damned thing from him this year. So I decided to take matters into my own hands: on Friday evening after work, I walked over to the Soho Apple store and bought myself a MacBook, the middle-of-the-line model with the white skin, 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo 2 processor, 80GB 5400 rpm HD, and 1GB of RAM. I had wanted to upgrade the RAM to 2GB, but the helpful salesman there told me not to bother—Apple charges $300 extra for the service, and I could get the chip myself over Crucial's website and install it myself. Now that's a good salesman.

I also received an excellent demonstration in how to run a retail store at holiday time: the place was packed, and there was a long but nicely moving line at the main registers. But my salesman directed me to another counter in the back, where they sold standard-configuration Macs as long as you were paying with a debit or credit card. The sale took me less than five minutes, from the moment I walked into the store to the moment I left. Then I took it home and duly recorded the opening of Steve Job's wonder (click the graphic above to see the show). Now, for the review...

The Good:

Display: Easily the clearest, most luminous and pleasing display I've ever seen on a laptop. It's not that mushy TFT stuff that makes dimples when you touch it; the surface is a hard, crystalline screen that places nothing between your eye and the image. As you can see, the quality of the image exceeds the beautiful TFT screen on my iMac desktop. I also have an outstanding Trinitron CRT for the Wintel machine, and it actually looks rather faded compared to the MacBook's display. Astonishing.

Keyboard: An ingenious piece of design. Again, I have to resort to superlatives: it's the most natural and comfortable keyboard I've touched on a laptop, and it beats most full-sized ergonomic boards. The spacing, location, and action of the keys has obviously been carefully thought out and rigorously tested. Apple design genius at its very best.

Processor speed: Intel Core Duo 2 heaven. It handles complex OS, graphical, and processing tasks with snappy aplomb. On my iMac PPC machine, just right-clicking a file to bring up a menu, or opening an application like Firefox or Word, would mean waiting through a delay of several seconds while the processor struggled with the request. On this machine, the spinning beach ball, bouncing dock icon, and winding wristwatch are very rare indeed. Some applications (see below) that have not made it into Universal Binary Land will strain the processor a bit, but this is a situation that can only improve with time and future development.

Two-finger scrolling: It's one of those "how-did-they-do-that" moments: you put one finger on the trackpad and the mouse arrow moves around as usual. You put another finger down and slide them left to right or up and down, and you're scrolling whatever window you're in, horizontally or vertically. Put down 3 or more fingers and the scrolling stops again. Very cool, and very useful (see below for my one complaint about the trackpad).

Heat Management: This machine is now my desktop Mac (I gave the iMac to my daughter to use at her Mom's house). So it's on for hours at a time, and it does get warm under the power supply. But I was impressed at how long it stayed cool, and even at maximum heat it still can sit on my lap without causing discomfort (though I don't make a habit of it, nor should you for numerous long-term health reasons). The battery scarcely gets hot at all, even after over two hours. This bodes very well for the endurance of the machine as a whole.

Weight: The MacBook is barely over an inch thick and five pounds light. It's easy to carry around the house or inside a bag (I have a backpack-style bag for it, and recommend this type of sack for any portable).

The Cool:

Photo Booth: My daughter's favorite application. It uses the iChat camera at the top of the display to take and happily distort photographs of self and/or self's cat.

iLife '06: If you've got a PC, then you probably know that Google created a great photo management product in Picasa (for either Windows or Linux). Nevertheless, iPhoto is a step ahead of Picasa for versatility, ease of use, and graphical quality. The rest of the iLife suite stands firmly on its own: Garage Band, iMovie, iDVD, and the new iWeb. My only complaint with them has been their extravagant system demands—they really take a toll on a PPC processor, but run like a breeze on this Intel machine. Here's an example of what I mean (and a demonstration of the might of this little machine): I opened iPhoto to choose, crop, and size the photos for this piece, then started Garage Band to make a brief podcast-style sound demo. Meanwhile, I also opened MS Word, to read from my Tao of Hogwarts book for the demo. Then I realized that I'd need a printout; but I hadn't installed the printer drivers for my Samsung Laser printer yet. So I inserted the driver disk and loaded the files while Word opened my book, a 290 page document with lots of graphics and formatting. I made the recording in GB and then opened iTunes to preview the file there and convert it to AAC format. As this was going on, I opened Transmit, the Mac FTP utility, and uploaded the graphics files. If you click on the picture of Professor Dumbledore, you can hear the result (credit goes to my daughter Maria for the lovely drawing).

The Challenging:

Mactel is cutting its teeth: I kept having to remind myself as I set this machine up, that Intel Macs are very new—just short of a year young. So you need some patience, because a lot of the hardware-software interface issues involve a "neither-fish-nor-fowl" dynamic. I noticed that some of Apple's own applications (Mail, most notably) worked better on the PPC machine than on this new Intel beauty. It took some work (and one crash of the app) to get Mail looking and behaving normally on the new machine.

It is also to be noted that third-party software is still transitioning. Freeway, my favorite WYSIWYG web editor that I use for the other site, is an unfortunate case in point. Their version 3.5 wouldn't load on the new Mac, and when I checked with their Support people, I was told that I'd have to upgrade to their version 4, at a cost of $100. Looks like it's time for me to brush up my rusty html skills. Or give iWeb a try—you don't need a .mac account to use it, especially now that there's Scott Finney's EasyiWeb Publisher available.

Neither Adobe (Photoshop) nor Microsoft (Office for Mac) have made their products universal binary-friendly. For me, that means that Photoshop Elements, though it loads and runs just fine, isn't any faster on the Intel Mac than it was on the PPC iMac (though Word and Excel fly along much better than they did on my iMac). You may run up against universal binary issues, and will have to do a little research to bone up: begin with this page at Apple's support site, which is a guide to what applications have made it to UB Land.

The one thing I haven't tried yet is loading Windows onto the Mac. I did it at work, at my last job, on an Intel Mac Mini running Parallels, and everything went fine. But this laptop is my Mac—why would I want to screw it up by loading Windows on it? Maybe someday...

The Reality:

Not Alienware: The video on the MacBook comes from an onboard Intel chip, which borrows RAM from the system memory to deliver graphics and video. It does it very well for ordinary applications like browsers, Quicktime files, Photoshop and iPhoto processing, and the like. But I suspect this is not a gamer's machine. For one thing, after playing a game with rapidly moving parts for a few minutes, the hard drive starts revving like a jet engine, and that's not a sound I prefer to hear coming out of a computer. That means the video chip has exhausted its supply of RAM and is hitting the swap file pretty hard. So if you're a rabid gamer, I have the following advice: (a) get a life; and (b) if (a) is not possible for you yet (I understand, I've been there), then pick up an Alienware box or, if you need a Mac, a MacBook Pro or one of their desktop machines, which have freestanding video cards with 128MB or 256MB of VRAM fueling them. This advice would also apply to video or graphics professionals, but without the "get a life" part, of course.


The Annoying:

Everybody's got to have a beef, right? I'm no different. I have two very minor complaints: the setup and file transfer utility, with which you move files and configuration arrangements from one Mac to another, needs a FireWire cable. I didn't have one, but I have a router connected to a cable modem, and lots of Ethernet cable. It all went well in the end, but I had to figure some things out along the way. It would have been easier if Apple had offered the option to transfer files via Ethernet rather than only with a FireWire cable.

Finally, you would think that with all of Apple's design and techno-genius, they'd figure out how to get a right-click mechanism into the trackpad. Thanks to the beautifully designed keyboard, this is less of a beef than it might otherwise have been. I just thought that once they'd gone to the two-button mouse with the "Mighty Mouse," they'd think of adding the same functionality to their laptop trackpads.

Well, if that's a deal-killer for you, then good luck with your Dell. But remember what we say, "you buy a Dell, you go to Hell..." Just go over to Buy Blue and compare: Dell, 88% of PAC contributions to the GOP; Apple, 99% to Democrats. Mind you, Apple's got its problems: the stock dating fiasco, one of their two blemishes in 2006 (the other being the odious alliance with the globalist child labor tyrant Nike), is bound to unravel further in 2007. But they invented the PC, and now, in the era of the Intel Mac, they've taken it back. Now, as it is with all of us, the only thing that could defeat Apple is for it to allow ego to take over. If it can avoid corporate complacency and market arrogance, then its future is secure.

Geek Wednesday: The Year of Mactel

Before we get to Geek Wednesday, this has to be mentioned, because we've now reached a primal-scream moment in the history of the Bush Administration's arrogant idiocy. After the American people clearly and abundantly said "No, No, No" to the rule of war and the military state, we are told that it's time for more of the same. Please, join Code Pink in demanding "no troop surge."

Geek Wednesday

Who were the standout geeks of 2006, you ask? Let's have a look...

Crazy like a 'Fox: Firefox released version 2.0 of its Gates-crashing browser, in the same week that MS put another twist onto its ancient turd, IE 7. Firefox is cleaner, more stable, faster, user-friendlier, more loaded with features and cool add-ons, and allaround more fun than IE 7, which is a banal imitation of better products. Opera also released a new version, 9.0, and managed a small coup in winning a spot as the default browser on the new Nintendo machines.

But Firefox is so good that the geeks of the Open Source world have already started re-inventing it again. Version 3.0, code-named "Gran Paradiso" is already in the alpha stage of development. I downloaded it for both the Windows machine and the Mac, and I can say it's very promising. It installs on its own path, rather than overwriting your existing 2.0 version; it grabs your bookmarks, gives you a link to their feedback form for incident reporting, and you're off. 3.0 is apparently a complete revamping of the Gecko engine, so this should be a major release when it's ready, probably late summer of '07. Meanwhile, IE 7 is still hobbling along on the same old tired Trident engine that it had five years ago.

Also on the browser front, though rather more quietly than the others discussed above, the amazing geeks at OmniGroup released a new version of OmniWeb, their outstanding Mac-only browser. It's not free, but it'll be the smartest fifteen bucks you've spent in a while, take my word for it. I also continue to use and wonder at the features and ease of OmniGraffle, their remarkable diagramming software that is head and shoulders above Visio for design, functionality, and overall fun. They've also released a new project management tool, which in combination with their other products gives them a sterling office suite for the Mac.

Google is a category all its own in geekdom. This year, they caused trouble for themselves by going to China without much of a plan, even as their stock price continued to rocket toward the $500 mark. But incidentally, why do they call it an "initial public offering" when a company starts selling stock? Does the public at large really have an interest in such things? Maybe I've got too broad a conception of what "the public" is to understand these points of high economics; but when I think of the public, I think of middle class working stiffs like myself who can barely afford rent, bills, and food every month, and feel lucky just to be able to have that and the ability to go into debt for a computer. I especially think of the people that Bob Herbert wrote about on Monday—folks who were left to die or suffer by a criminally negligent government, and still live in dire privation. The stock market / IPO culture we've built misses those folks, and many of the rest of us, too.

Anyway back to Google. For me, their most significant accomplishment this year was the release of their two-pronged online office suite, which includes their home-brewed Spreadsheet application and the ingenious Writely word processor. Together, they are GoogleDocs, and may be all the productivity application you need.

iWant: But the geeks with the biggest bite (and the largest profits) in 2006 are of the Cupertino variety. At last, after 5+ years of iPods, the world got back the Macintosh. The Intel switch is transforming geekdom, all the way to the point where the geek press is speculating on the possibilities of Apple for the enterprise. Having personally set up one of these machines with Parallels and Windows XP inside Mac OS X, I can say that Mr. Yager ain't nuts at all.

But Apple's sights, for now, appear set on the den rather than the boardroom. In about three weeks, MacWorld 2007 should feature the rollout of iTV, something that many Mac users and would-be Mac switchers are yearning for. Consider these observations from our own Nearly Redmond Nick:

How are these guys supposed to own the living room without a TV tuner!? I mean, Microsoft shipped Media Center Edition quite a while back, with full support for a tuner and a DVR. In fact, my brother is running a sub-$1000 Dell with Dual TV tuners, so he can watch a football game while recording Dancing with the Stars. He can also use a nifty little remote to play movies and music, and browse pictures. But for all Apple has done, Front Row has not measured up, and I still need to spend an extra $200 to watch TV on my Mac. Booooo.

Be patient, Nick: your time of 24" iMac, iTV heaven is not far off. Soon after MacWorld, Apple will be releasing the next version of its world-beating OS, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. They've been kind of secretive about what's in this thing, as if they were worried about someone stealing their ideas. Well, in this video, David Pogue of the New York Times puts the lie to that suspicion.

So my Xmas list has only one item on it: a 2.0 GHz MacBook with an 80GB HD and 2GB of RAM. But Santa may need some help...there's a donation link in the sidebar. If the 100 average daily unique visitors that we get here toss two bucks apiece into the cyber tip jar, I'd be blogging from the road in a week!

Now that you've fed the kitty, here are some holiday season links for Daily Revolutionaries everywhere.

Ideal Bite: A gift and lifestyle site for the planetary-conscious among us. They have a subscription newsletter with some lively ideas on things to buy, eat, and do. Worth a look.

Rieses Pieces: This is our StumbleUpon site of the week, and it makes you wonder what's in the water in the Phillippines, that the kids there are growing up so smart and socially aware. As with the Klassy site that we looked at earlier, there's very good stuff here.

Concert Vault: If you're a music lover, maybe you already know about this site. If you are and don't, well bookmark it immediately. Next month, we'll be dipping into the Vault when we take a look back at Pink Floyd's Animals, which will mark the 30th anniversary of its initial release in January. Meanwhile, have a look and a listen around the Vault, and you'll be taken back in time. And you may not want to come back.

Finally, a look at my votes for best blogs of 2006:

One Good Move: Norm Jenson still runs the most intelligent, entertaining, and robust weblog around. I check it every day, and it's where we find most of the videos we post here at DR. Norm, if OGM comes up in my Webby reviewer's pile on the next round, you're getting a straight 10.

Altercation: Eric Alterman took a fairly punishing professional hit this year, getting booted off MSNBC.com, and he sprang back with agility at Media Matters. His insight on the mass media makes him a leading voice for a return to sanity in this nation; and as I have mentioned before, he wouldn't be a bad choice as Press Secretary after Obama wins in 2008.

Think Progress: These guys don't miss a trick that the Bushies and their cronies in Congress have tried to push past us these past six years. Great stories, well researched.

MoJo Blog: The journalists at Mother Jones can keep you up to date, in case you don't have time to read their excellent magazine (which, at a mere $10 a year, is one of the great bargains of our time).

For more great blogs and sites, check the sidebar. And thanks to all the geeks out there who make it possible, from the inventor himself to all the guys and gals writing code in the Open Source Society, so we can still freely share ideas amid an increasingly oppressive culture of corporate government.

Geek Wednesday: zzzzzzZune

Hey everybody, it's Night the Cat here with Geek Wednesday. My human thinks he might have finally found a job with—get this—a credit card company. Well, if you knew this guy like I do, you'd be laughing too.

Anyway, now that it looks like the tuna will be rolling in as usual here, let me show you my new Zuna. Heh, heh, had you fooled there for a second, didn't I? Well, if you're nuts (and if you're a human, you are) or just like to have the latest thing, they're $250 for 30GB—exact same price as the iPod, wouldn't you know. Microsoft, they're sooo creative.

So let's move on to the big geek questions of the week. What happened to the Diebold voting machine fix that we've been warning you about here? Well, one theory is that the GOP took a dive. Or it could be that these guys are so incompetent that they can't even cheat correctly. Or maybe they rigged the boxes to swing an average of five per cent and they lost most of their races by more than that.

My theory is that the machines rebelled. Hey, you've seen it happen; and as our buddy Nearly Redmond Nick has said, "sometimes I swear these machines have souls." But not this kind of soul.

Speaking of soul, here's the Woz reminiscing about the early days of Apple and PC's.

Even today, a week before the formal release of the candy-coated anti-operating system, there are still a few geeks out there who can make some elegant hardware and software. If you've got a Mac, check out The Omni Group. There's nothing these people do that isn't cool. The OmniWeb browser is like a blueblood Firefox; it delivers web pages with blazing speed and a cool grace. Here's a screen capture. The browser's now on sale for ten bucks, and it's worth every penny and more. If you've got a Mac, you won't regret having OmniWeb in your dock.



While you're there, check out their other stuff, especially Omnigraffle, which has all the features and functions of Visio but with a fun, user-friendly whiteboard interface; and OmniOutliner, which is an essential tool for writers, artists, and organizers. We got the Productivity Bundle here, which includes all of the above plus their Disksweeper utility. It's another great reason for using a Mac: the third-party stuff is just more creative, more useful, more fun, and in the end, cheaper, than Windoze garbage.

Don't have a Mac yet? Think they're too expensive? Wait till you see what you'll have to spend on hardware to run Vista (which could explain why Dell gobbled up Alienware). But there's lots of cool new features to it, like the "black screen of near-death" which the C-Net reviewers talked about (link above). After you're done looking at those wonderful new things from the anti-OS, check out this video. Then remember that for $600 you can get a kickass desktop machine that sports an Intel Core Duo processor and an operating system that really works (keep an eye out—the Core Duo 2's may be coming to the Mac Mini very soon).


Or you can go out on Black Friday and get a $99 laptop with a lame Celeron processor and a world of future headaches and expense. Your choice. See ya, humans.

__________________________

Well done, puss. The tuna's in the bowl and black's my favorite color. I've been thinking about what to tell people at the office as I prepare to leave after 3 years. Being a psychotherapist, I suppose it's natural to think foremost of the dysfunctional characters who inhabit the top positions there, and what they need to know in order to round off their sharp edges and recover some natural sense of humanity. Here are some notes I made for a message to the CIO:

Act from your center. Tolerate mistakes—those of others, but especially your own. Build consensus by example. Accord with yourself first, and others will effortlessly find common ground beside you.

Remember that technology is made by and for humans; robots are still the stuff of science fiction movies and search algorithms. Zero and One do not write the code; people do. Remind your colleagues of this, and especially, keep reminding yourself.

Above all, nurture humility. There is no quality so necessary, or so absent, among corporate executives today. But in order to nurture humility, you must first learn to recognize it—that is, to feel it within you. It is the affirmation of the individual in the context of the universal. It is the self-realization that finds its worth through a perspective on the whole; but it is never self-abasement.

I can only imagine how far you feel from it now, absorbed as you are in fear, hatred, paranoia, and aggrandizement. But none of us is ever far from humility. In a single moment's effort; with the instant it takes to demolish the black wall you've erected between your heart and its Source; in the second needed to call clearly through the cloud of ego for the help you need from the invisible realm—the great delusion is penetrated and humility is, in that moment, achieved.

When you find that moment within yourself, you will also discover the natural qualities of leadership that you have always thought are distant and separate from you. Learn to guide yourself, and you will become a leader to others.