Category: Technology

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I don’t travel well anymore. Oh, I like my car trips, but I don’t care much for flying in this paranoid, bankrupt age and even the train was tiring. I think if the circumstances had been better, or I had reserved a sleeper on the train or the location wasn’t so inaccessible for these forms of mass transportation (Sandpoint is a out of the way), I would have liked traveling better. Now, though, I don’t see myself going any place significant until SxSW in March–and for that I’ll drive.

One casualty of the trip is auld tin, my TiBook. The existing magenta line has now been joined by another, which changes color and comes and goes: sometimes it’s yellow, other times a bright orange-pink. If I press on the lid just so it goes away, but it always returns. My DVD player has also bit the dust and scratches DVDs and the hard drive is just too small and the memory too low. The battery is stuck, but comes undone enough so I can’t depend on it. The viewscreen is failing.

I have a Dell laptop and it’s in surprising good condition, but weighs close to 15 pounds since it’s considered a portable desktop. It should last a good long time, but causes permanent joint damage when I lug it around in the laptop bag. I am partial to the Powerbook. I like the lightness, but more than that, I really like OS X. I don’t think that Apple is a perfect company, but I still admire the move to a new graphical interface built on open source Unix.

Now that I’m working fairly consistently, I can think of actually perhaps even maybe think about replacing things that aren’t working–starting with health insurance for yours truly. This includes taking care of overdue repairs on the car, getting some long-term dental work finished, and even–miracles!–getting replacements for old and tired computer equipment.

Both of my laptops will be five years old this December. For a computer professional who works heavily with PhotoShop, as well as various tweaky technologies, stretching one’s computer to five years is pushing the machine and the user. I think about replacing my primary laptop, but getting another Powerbook gives me pause and the reason is cost: Apple computers cost more than those that run Windows or Linux. A whole lot more.

Or do they?

The assumption I’ve had is that you pay extra, a premium, for Apple over Windows but I wonder how much of this is the fact that much of the Apple machines come pre-packaged with so many items that are bought separately from a Windows laptop. I decided to do a comparison between a Powerbook and a similarly loaded laptop at leading vendor Dell; I wanted to see how much more the Apple did cost.

The Powerbook I looked at is the 1.67 GHz 15-inch G4. I decided to load it up with 1GHz of memory, and am content with the 80GB hard drive. I also accepted the standard ATI Mobility graphics card with 128 MB DDR memory. It comes with ethernet, modem, and airport card pre-installed, in addition to a superdrive that includes a read-write DVD/CD combo. It supports both USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 and 800.

For the Dell, I picked out the Dell XPS M100. It’s also lightweight, and features a variety of processors, as well as a 15 inch monitor. I picked the 1.86MHz CPU, with 1GB of memory, and an 80GB hard drive. I picked the True Life monitor to try and match the equivalent quality of the Apple, which added 25.00.

The Dell also comes with a read-write DVD/CD combo and a wireless card, internal modem, and integrated ethernet. In fact, built-in internet capability is ubiquitous now, and it makes no sense for laptops not to be modem, ethernet, and wireless enabled.

The Dell doesn’t have firewire but does have four USB 2.0 ports. It also comes with a 2 year warranty, while Apple’s is one. Dell also provides in-home support, and I’ve used it before and know it to be good. As for Apple–hee, that’s a funny one.

The price out of the box for the Powerbook at Apple is $2,099.00 US. The price out of the box for the Dell is $1,483.00. If I up the CPU for the Dell, the cost would rise another 200.00 and 400.00 for each upgrade.

Though it’s difficult to compare the two since there are some architectural differences, you can see that the Apple Powerbook is not necessarily that much higher than a comparable one at Dell and other vendors. Laptops do cost more, and if you build the laptop to meet the needs of a photographer or coder or even to work on a web site or weblog, you need a minimum amount of memory and space (and hopefully graphics card if you can afford an upgrade).

So the price difference exists but isn’t extreme. What you then have to look at is how you value the operating system, which is what pulls all the pieces together.

Right now I have a dual boot on my Windows laptop with Ubuntu and Windows 2000. They both work great, but then so does OS 10.3 on my TiBook. I like all three operating systems and code and play and work effortlessly in all three, primarily because I use OpenOffice (or NeoOffice) for office productivity work, and am making increasing use of gimp for photography. Most of my development is PHP and MySQL on Apache, which works in all three environments–as does my browser and most of my other tools. Thanks to open source, one isn’t forced into a specific operating system because of a specific application nowadays. No more, …but it runs Office as the reason to lock into an operating system.

Ultimately, I cannot get over how great it is to have the ease and use of the sophisticated Apple interfacce built on the powerhouse that is Unix. That was the Apple decision that brought me over to the company and led me to buy in the first place; and when it comes to upgrading my laptop, it is this decision that’s keeps me coming back. How much do I value it? Enough to pay about $400.00 extra for the Powerbook over the Dell laptop.

It’s on my list. As is whatever I need to keep my Windows machine happy. In the meantime, I find that if I tap my auld tin here the stripe turns blue. Perhaps its time for a blue theme for my next web site design. Blue and magenta.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In case I was too subtle in the last post, if you have a gmail account, I would immediately check to see if any of the emails in your incoming or outgoing folders have a password in them. If so, I would change the password at these accounts mentioned in the emails.

I would also recommend that you access the gmail settings, and set forwarding on your gmail account to forward to a more secure email system and trash the emails sent to you on gmail.

In plain words: do not use gmail for sensitive, important, or daily communication. Even with this bug being fixed, this demonstrates the vulnerability of centralized applications and data outside of your control. More than that, it demonstrates the infeasibility of trusting your day to day communications to beta software. My bad for doing so.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

In a post titled Passion is Blind Kathy Sierra discusses passionate users, double-standards, and forgiveness:

But there’s no getting around it–we all have double standards. We are all cutting one side some slack while holding the other to our ruthless, concrete expectations. And of course we will all screw up. We aren’t perfect. Neither is our software, our hardware, our service, our support, our employees, our policies, our products and services and ideas. But that’s the beauty of passion–if you can inspire it, by helping your user kick ass–they WILL cut you some slack. They’ll forgive you when you screw up.

To demonstrate her point, Kathy uses the now legendary support that Apple customers feel for the company, as compared to Microsoft customers.

It is true that it seems as if Apple can do no wrong, and Microsoft do no good. In fact, the unstable nature of Windows and the ‘blue screen of death’ is a standing joke in the industry. However, I imagine if there were as many Mac users as Windows users, we would hear the sounds of dissatisfaction about Apple just as loudly. In fact, from the anger expressed by many about the new Nano iPods, Apple doesn’t necessarily have the same ‘free’ ride it has enjoyed in the past. Apple is not as successful as Microsoft, but it successful enough.

How does a company get a break from its users? It’s easy: all they have to do is stay small, or appear to stay small; personalize the company so that being critical of a product is equated to being critical of a person or a group of people; most importantly, create a feeling of being an insider by being a customer–all the cool kids have iPods, you know.

(Personally, all the really cool kids have super-cheap iPod rip offs, and use the money they save to buy more music.)

Does this all then mean that there’s a double-standard in play because we’re critical of Microsoft where we’re not of Apple? If both companies delivered the exact same products, possibly, but both companies don’t deliver the same product. True, Apple and Microsoft both deliver an operating system–but the claims they make for both differ dramatically.

Apple promises to provide an environment in which you can add and remove devices and rarely have to worry about configuration; that’s simple to use and easy to maintain; that doesn’t have some of the performance issues associated with fragmented disk space and so on. The company can make these promises because it provides much of the hardware as well as the software, and in this environment, it’s easy to follow through on the claims. It is the hardware that allows Apple to shine, and which sets itself apart from Microsoft.

Apple focuses as much of its effort on design as it does engineering–knowing that people are easily swayed by smooth corners and sexy slim lines. Someone, somewhere thought, “Let’s put a lighted Mac logo on the back of all our notebooks”, so that a seeming sea of blinking apples face us out of conference after conference, even though in the beginning most notebooks probably weren’t Apple (but that changed, as all the cool kids etc.)

All in all, Apple promises what it can deliver. Apple promises to be easy, and it is; Apple promises to be sexy, and it is. What Apple doesn’t promise is what it can’t deliver: to be a cheap, reliable work horse.

Microsoft, on the other hand, is a company that makes claims based on its weaknesses, rather than its strengths. It makes grand promises about security, and thus virtually guarantees being a target; releasing, on average, one new security bulletin a week. It brags about reliability, when the operating system has to work on devices that range from the powerhouse to the puny. It seeks to win over business based on the stability of its products, and just when developers had created a wealth of applications in one environment (COM, DCOM, and COM+), it abandons it and the developers in favor of something completely new (.NET).

To be blunt: Microsoft has a corporate death wish, but will never be allowed to die and will, instead, thrive. This rather astonishing contradiction is based on the fact that the Windows operating system is about as ubiquitous as the common cold; the kicker is the reason it’s so ubiquitous is that Microsoft makes promises it can’t keep. Soooo, Microsoft gets slapped, true; but it gets slapped all the way to the bank.

Saying there’s a double-standard, then, when people complain about having to re-boot a Windows laptop, as compared to having to re-boot an Apple powerbook implies that both systems are focused on the same audience, and based on the same promises. It ain’t no such thing.

And this leads us to the second example Kathy uses in her post: she also references the past discussion that occurred when Phil Ringnalda noticed the sponsored links at the O’Reilly web sites, and when I brought up the sponsored links at my own site:

But sometimes our double-standards bite us in the ass and we’re forced to face it, as Phil Ringnalda did a few months back. When O’Reilly appeared to have search-engine-gaming ads, Phil slammed him in this blog entry. But when his friend Shelley Powers does it, the conversation got very interesting. It was fun (and impressive) to see Phil acknowledge and wrestle with the ambiguity of it all.

True, Phil is my bud–and not just because he has a great way with a rant. But was he indulging in a double-standard because he was critical of O’Reilly for sponsored links but not as critical of me? If he had continued being as unevenly critical, yes. In the end, though, as discussion on the topic brought about a deeper understanding of the issues, I think he was equally disappointed with both of us, but my cat, Zoë, won him over to the dark side.

In the end of her post, Kathy writes:

So, we have to ask ourselves… what can we do to put ourselves on the side of forgiveness? What can we do to help protect us from the times when we will screw up? What would it take in our product, company, service, whatever — to get users to have a glass-half-full attitude about whatever it is we do? If “rebooting” is a metaphor, I’d rather be Apple than Microsoft.

As a developer I try not to make mistakes, but when I do, I fix them. I would hope that ‘forgiveness’ never enters the equation, as forgiveness implies an emotional context, and what does code have to do with emotion? As for my site, what can I do to put myself on the side of forgiveness? I can do nothing, because I promise nothing.