Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (or other), and why?
Dvorak's new article is another inflammatory attempt at driving traffic to his site by presenting an argument counter to common tech wisdom. Ok I'll bite.
Dvorak - the iPhone is no desktop
His Main Points:
1. Smaller is becoming a problem.
2. Laptop as you only computer means you squint at a small screen and go blind - because they use a laptop at work as their main machine.
3. Because laptops don't get backed up, if it gets lost or broken they are toast.
4. Laptops are delicate.
5. Everyone thinks that the iPhone is going to be the next major computing platform. - What happens if people spill coffee on them?
6. They leave them all over, unlocked and with limited encryption. -Data robbing.
7. Claims that the desktop computer is the best model for computing. for 10 reasons: upgrade, displays, expandability, harder to steal, good input devices.
8, Only uses a laptop for travel.
9. Doesn't want to lug a laptop between home and work where it could break in the car.
10. If he wants data to be portable he'll load it on his 32G thumb drive.
Before I dive into the specifics of why he is an obsolete dinosaur who is nearly always wrong now, let's challenge the premise and then I'll counter his specific arguments. First why would we want the iPhone to be a desktop? What is so sacred about the desktop that it should be the model for all future technology? Next he uses the phrase 'computing' a lot. What is meant by that? What actually IS computing? My guess is that it is something that few people think they are doing, or even want to do. Lets say for sake of argument that the desktop IS the best computing platform (what ever that means), people don't buy an iPhone because they want to compute! The average iPhone consumer doesn't want to 'compute', he wants to find information, be entertained, stay connected with friends and he wants to do that from anywhere he goes.
Continue reading "Dvorakosaurus"...
An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
We don't normally post about sports here (as I don't think any of us follows them), but this is an interesting technical article: EXCLUSIVE: Barry Bonds' Home Run Record Tainted by Mechanical Device.
I've never seen Bonds at bat, but I was immediately suspicious after reading the article, and grabbed some pictures of him. Wow - that contraption on his arm sure seems like an unfair advantage. It's like one of those training apparatuses used to straighten your golf swing. How does MLB allow him to wear that? More pictures after the jump.
Continue reading "Mechanical Bonds"...I love gadgets and devices, but I don't yet own a cell phone. I have a family and kids that are away from the house a lot of the time - so I have some legitimate use cases. The problem is that I've lived long enough without one that I just can't be convinced that I 'need' one. (It has also become a bit of a challenge to see how long I can hold out). I especially do not 'need' one enough to justify the amount of money a month it costs. I have no problem shelling out a 'one time' chunk of change for PDAs, Laptops, cameras, game consoles and the like, but a monthly bill is something different entirely for me. Regardless of the amount, any new monthly bill feels like another ball and chain I have to drag around. For the rest of the masses, they (meaning probably 99% of you) absorbed that initial price shock years ago and now just accept it as a cost of life. Now they get nickeled and dimed to death and don't even notice.
Continue reading "Cell Phone Nation"...
So far I think Google Notebook is pretty cool and I really like the integration with Firefox. But I'm now even more miffed at the disconnect in Google's bookmarking strategy. They have a bookmark system on your personalized search page. This one behaves much like delicious, with tags and what not, and a clever bookmarklet. But it is not connected to the bookmarks content on your personalized homepage??!? That one is completly separate somehow.
Now here comes notebook, which is much slicker, but is separate from the rest and doesn't support tagging
at all (or RSS from what I can see). Instead it has a more traditional folder style system. That is so not like gmail, where folders are bad.
So in conclusion I think this is a good first (or, hmm, 3rd) attempt but it still falls short of the uber online bookmarking system I've been waiting for. I'm sure they will get it right in the next rev.
Discuss.
Due to a lack of anyone posting anything for almost a month (where is the Xbox 360 review, Sniffy?), here are some of my gratuitous "Top n of 2005" lists, where n is not a large number 'cause that would take too much time.
Continue reading "Is This Thing On?"...Dvorak rants on the future of Advertisting.
It seems the only model he likes is Google's. I have to agree, targeted text based ads seem much less offensive and annoying to me than all the crazy eye spam that you get on most web sites. In fact it is these ads that finally drove me away from hotmail as my main mail account (after nearly 9 years of loyal use). It appears to me that Hotmail is 80% financed by dating services. That is totally annoying to me.
So Google is building a empire of free stuff, powered (at least at the moment) solely by advertisement revenue. This is like the TV and Radio of yesteryear – except that the ads are relevant and so far un-obtrusive. I wonder if this model can sustain it though. I’m not sure that everything lends itself to targeted ads, but I could be wrong.
Questions:
Windows 98% of the time - it gets the job done.
I run OS X a small amount for one purpose only - Xcode with the iPhone SDK. Even then I access it from Windows with VNC. While using Xcode I access the web, notes, documents and graphics editing etc all from Windows on a separate monitor.
At work I develop for Linux, but my primary environment is Windows. I still play with new distros at home, but probably only a few times a year now, - and only from within a virtual machine.
I've cooled off on Vista (because of 64bit problems) and now I live most of the time in my XP partition again. I'm warming up to Windows 7 and will likely switch to it when it comes out. I'll install it 32 bit though (thanks to Cisco's refusal to create a 64bit version of the VPN client I need).
I am 90% sure that my next Laptop will be a Macbook Pro however. I expect I'll be living in Windows most of the time though, since I've got so much time invested in it. My ideal solution would be to boot to Windows and then run OS X in a virtual machine, but Steve won't let me do that.
For a second there, I thought you said you were running Windows 98.