… they call it osx.iusethis.com — an application tracker site updated with all the Web2.0 goodies you would expect. (The first public site that I’m aware of using Catalyst; run by two of the core developers, AIUT.)
We went out to the Apple store last weekend, to buy a computer for TheChild. There’s been an older Intel desktop in the living room for some time that’s been nominally “hers”, but it was a bit slow and more than a bit noisy and generally just not very convenient to use. Plus I’m still not convinced that the hypothesis that Windows use causes long-term cognitive damage is untrue, and I’d rather not take the chance.
The original plan was to buy a Mini, and recycle the monitor that we were using with the previous system. The original plan was scrapped on encountering the iMac G5 and realizing that the part-time teaching I do at JHU makes me eligible for an educational discount, which lowered the price that critical amount necessary for psychological buy-in.
We also dodged a bit of a bullet: two days after our purchase, Apple announced changes to the Mini line — primarily a bump in the standard RAM, a bump which I would have paid for had we gone with the Mini instead of the G5. I suppose that’s what I get for going in to buy Apple hardware without researching the rumor sites first…
QOTD, from Tom Limoncelli at Everything Sysadmin, in response to a Tiger upgrade offer from Apple:
Apple: But then you won’t enjoy the orgasmic delights of Tiger until Christmas!
Me: No, I run a PRODUCTION SHOP. I can’t deploy Tiger until it has gone through internal testing and acceptance. I could buy one or two copies to do that, then buy the rest in December. You see, I’m not a pissant video shop full of arthouse goofballs that think 300G of disk space is “big”. I’m not a amateur musician that is impressed at the “Genius Bar” when someone can explain two different ways to “underline text in iWork pages”. We do real work with these machines and we have to have discipline about these things. I doubt we’ll actually deploy Tiger for a few months.
He also has some interesting math for anybody that bought into the recent “36 months of upgrades” plan that Apple was offering…
Winn Schwartau, heap-big information security guy, is switching
to Macintosh:
In the coming weeks I am going to keep a diary of an experiment that I began in my company at 6PM GMT-5, April 29, 2005.
An experiment predicated upon an hypothesis that the WinTel platform represents the greatest violation of the basic tenets of information security and has become, indeed, a national economic security risk. I do not say this lightly, and I have never been a Microsoft Basher, either. I do not and will not dis any one company without a fair bit of explanation, justification and supportive evidence or experience.
So bear with me as I attempt to document the results of my experiment and I will attempt be fair to myself, my company, our clients and the computing public at large.
Should be interesting to watch.
Jef Raskin, creator of the Macintosh and human interface designer extraordinaire, has passed on.
Update: From the ‘Jef Raskin’ Wikipedia entry:
Jef Raskin died of cancer on 2005-02-26. As a tribute to him, someone anonymously put this comment in a web forum:
“[Undo]! [Undo]!”
Scott Kurtz, creator of the web- and print-comic pVp has been getting harassed by Macintosh zealots, and he’s taken an interesting approach to dealing with the problem: telling them that if they want him to use a Mac so badly, they should donate some money to make it possible for him to buy one. (Worth looking at just to see the graph of how much money has been donated so far…)