Think, but not too much. Think different, but not too different

Dave Winer, in his DaveNet site, asked last week about where the thinkers are. In part he suggests this conventional wisdom (Earth's Website):

Thinking isn't important, feeling is what's important.

Logic isn't important, intuition is what's important.

Science isn't important, perception is what's important.

This is pure bullshit!

As I often do, I found myself agreeing with his ideas. Why then, if somebody is really interested in thinking would they post a link to the story I'm about to talk about. It baffles me. Dave linked to Fred Langa's opinion piece on Apple's Heavy Hand Strikes Again as if it were news worthy. The irony of the whole thing is that both a reference to wanting people to think about technology and the link to Langa's piece were posted on the same day and appear a few lines away from one another.

In fact it is little more than uninformed mac-bashing. Why are windows advocates so scared of the little iMac? Maybe it's just too much to handle having a highly useable, highly customizable computer that most second graders can set up.

Point by point

Let's look at Langa's points (or misinformation) one at a time.

And now, Apple appears to have planted another anti-clone land mine in the new Mac OS 8.5, which mostly plays cosmetic catch-up to Windows, adding features that have been in the Microsoft OS for years.

Apple says it supports OS 8.5 only on Apple-branded PowerPC systems. This is bad enough -- sort of like saying if you buy a Buick, you can only use Buick-brand gasoline, Buick tires, Buick wiper blades, etc.

But it's worse than even that. It's not enough to have an authentic Apple-branded system. Early user reports suggest even the components have to be Apple-branded. And God help you if you upgraded your system with, say, a non-Apple drive: The new OS may refuse to install, or may install and trash your drive.

If one reads what is really happening here it turns out it has nothing to do with Apple-branded hardware. In fact there really is no such thing as an Apple-branded hard drive. Every Mac has shipped with another company's hard drive since day one. At one time, more than a year ago, it was not possible to use Apple's disk drive setup utilities on drives they didn't ship. Two major releases of the operating system ago at least they fixed that problem.

The problem that Langa misses is in the drivers. There have yet to be reports of problems using Apple drivers and upgrading. They are all with using drivers that are incompatible with the new operating system. I've told every person who has asked that I would recommend the Apple drivers over the other options. (as have the sites Langa quotes next.)

"Adding features that have been in windows for years," is the way Langa describes MacOS 8.5. Perhaps he could help me then, I wasn't aware that Apple Script or anything like it was available for windows. So many of us have been lead astray. On the other hand, I haven't seen that Windows has built in, as a part of the desktop and not a web browser, searching of the internet. Yes you probably can do it with a third party -- you could with Mac too. Find by content, better performance than Windows NT, faster copies, AppleScripted folders, hyper card and an editor for managing the system that a user can easily understand. I've been missing so much in windows. (not to mention simple finder, the apple menu.... you get the picture)

MacInTouch, an on-line Mac community, reports "more than 1,000 MacInTouch readers have reported severe disk corruption associated with the upgrade process. Many lost valuable work, and others lost a great deal of time or money."

MacInTouch also reports, "Apple continues to investigate the issue, collecting drives for analysis and requiring the owners to sign nondisclosure agreements that prevent them from discussing the problem." So it's hard to know exactly what's going on.

How convenient it is to take things out of context. MacFixit (which runs pretty close to MacInTouch) strongly recommends upgrading in spite of the few problems. 1,000 sounds pretty impressive but becomes less so when it's put in the context of 0.05% of upgrading users have reported severe problems.

What's Apple doing? Langa also failed to mention that Apple engineers are looking for systems to be shipped to them at their expense to figure out this problem. Hardly the picture Langa paints.

But it sure looks fishy. Hard drives are pretty generic. They're commodities. There's no mystery to them, no new standards and practices to be worked out. I mean, if we were talking USB or DVD issues, I could understand it. But hard drives?

How many times does it take. It's the drivers. It doesn't even take somebody who can troubleshoot windows to figure it out. The thrid-party drives ship with thrid-party drivers. Only third-party drives and Apple drives reformatted with thrid-party drivers seem to have problems. Of course drives are generic. Drivers aren't.

This bit, though, does show even further Langa's bais towards a Windows environment. He, unlike most Mac users, expects new technology (USB, DVD) not to work on his computer or at least "understands" when it doesn't. I own several machines and have DVD on many of them. It works fine on the Macs.

Putting the best possible face on this problem, it looks like colossal incompetence to fail to provide decent hard-drive installation routines. A less charitable view, circumstantially backed by Apple's "Apple only" support policy, suggests something far more evil: a way to force users to buy and use only products from Apple.

Either way, users lose. Apple once again eliminates choice and makes you do things its way or not at all.

Man, I'm glad Apple has a tiny market share. It would be a horrible, expensive, choiceless computing world if it were in charge. Microsoft has many failings and ugly practices, but in its wildest dreams, it's never been anywhere nearly as totalitarian as Apple.

Apple says, "Think different." But what it means is think in exactly the way Apple wants you to.

Sorry to disappoint you but the market share is growing. It's amazing to see people argue that consolidating to a single operating system that doesn't work well on most of the machines it's supposed to is better than having multiple operating systems operating on several platforms.

Where I sit

I come to this "debate" from the position of an administrator of all kinds of computers. I use Mac, Windows and UNIX machines every day. I have Mac, Windows, and UNIX servers in my business. I'd not like to be stuck with any one of them.

When I visit stores with pitiful Mac software I'm glad to have windows available (although it runs faster on my Mac than it does on my Gateway). When I want a machine that will work reliably and allow me to think in the ways that make me more productive I'm glad to have my Mac. When I want raw power Linux kicks everybody out of the race. If there were more tools for Linux (Frontier for one), I'd convert darn near every machine I have into a linux machine. When I want to kick back and play a game I am grateful for my Mac and for my Sony PlayStation II.

The Games Thing

Games don't help you think different. At least they don't me. For me it's a matter of figuring out the, sometimes complex, world of the game and then getting bored for a long time. I still can't figure out why people buy computer games.

Just about every game is available for all kinds of video systems, (Sony, Nintendo, etc.). The stations cost a lot less than any computer you can play them on (90% less), and the games themselves cost the same or less for video-game systems. Why then would somebody use a bulky, $2000 machine to do what a much smaller, easier to move $200 system will do quite nicely.

So, your options really are:

Buy a $2000 PC Buy a $2000 Mac Buy a $150 Game station

Granted most people already own PC's or Mac's so it wouldn't be quite that bad, but given the number of second-hand video game stores around most towns it is a LOT cheaper to buy games for them and the titles rival most PC games.