That might lead you to peg me as a Mac guy. You’d be half right. I like anything that’s new and shiny. Here’s what I am excited about right now.

iMac pls

Let’s get this out of the way: my apostasy is worsening.

Back in 2006, Tycho/Jerry of Penny Arcade went into the PC vs. Mac thing (here and here). Like Jerry, I didn’t like Apple’s marketing campaigns, and it cast a pall over pretty much everything they’d do. Once I read his pieces on this, though, I had to think twice. I started to let go of my grudge. From there, it became just a matter of time: I had to use a Mac Mini; I chose a MacBook Pro over a PC for my work laptop; I bought a unibody MacBook this past March; and I got Snow Leopard.

At any rate, I’ve coveted a Mac on my desktop ever since my Mac Mini experience. I’m glad I waited! It’s likely I’ll spring for one in November, and the 27″ Intel Core i5 seems like a really, really solid choice. The new mouse looks pretty cool, too, although I have some misgivings as to whether or not it’s practical.

My reasons for Mac lust? In short, I feel it’s the best trade-off between usability and power. Windows isn’t powerful or transparent enough for me, and Linux is often too transparent and fairly clunky. OS X is running freaking BSD under the hood, and has really solid UI design.

Windows 7

So, um, I also like Windows 7. In fact, I’m typing all of this on a Windows 7 machine right now. It’s shiny! It’s new! Granted, I play video games, so I can’t avoid Windows and I’m sick of running an OS that was showing its age a few years ago. But it helps to be, you know, excited about the whole thing, and I am.

For instance, I like how you can search the start menu. I like how you can search the control panel for settings. The Dock new taskbar is solid, what with Aero Peek and all. In general, I enjoy the sort of cognitive dissonance or brain shock that comes from seeing and learning a new user interface, and given that I never used Vista for very long, I’m quite happy to use it.

Of course, it’s still Windows, which means they cripple parts of the OS so they can charge more. I’m a bit peeved that Home Premium doesn’t include a Remote Desktop server. Whereas I’d prefer RDP over VNC, I don’t $80-like RDP and [TightVNC] is $0.

The method for looking at logs and whatnot is absurd— I was trying to troubleshoot a problem where my machine would go to sleep (good) and wake up 30s later (bad). It would do this all night and all day (really bad). I fired up Event Viewer or whatever it’s called and, of course, all of the logs are in XML, so they must be parsed! That’s ~3s where I sit there trying not to twitch.

Karmic Koala!

Aaand I’m also excited about Ubuntu 9.10. Maybe I just have a thing about operating systems? I use Ubuntu at work, and I really appreciate it in that context. I even took the step of using a fairly minimalist tiling window manager to maximize screen space and performance.

If this seems at odds with my affinity for Mac OS, you’re right. It doesn’t make sense to me, either.

I think I’m just fascinated with the idea of an OS that’s completely transparent. Everything is designed to be poked and prodded or used, from /proc to everything in /etc. The command line tools revolve around and interoperate using a simple building block: plain text! I think what it comes down to is that when there’s a real problem with my system, I want any fancy features to get out of my way— I want to get as close to the bottom as I can. Linux is good at that, which is part of the problem with it, of course.

I’m not sure when I’ll find time to install and use it. This is actually kind of a problem: I don’t have nearly enough monitors to install and run simultaneously some four-odd operating systems. Plus I’ve got to do the whole clean install thing for Win7 to do. And I figure in a month or two, I might be running an iMac as my main machine, meaning I’ll need to transfer over various media and miscellanea. Whee!

That’s all for now

I’m done geeking out now. Have a good night!

First of all, a little known company released a little known operating system. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It’s kind of a big deal! Vista was a black eye, for a variety of reasons, and Windows 7 is very much an attempt to recover from the loss of reputation and generate interest in their operating systems once again.

In light of Windows 7′s release, you can find a whole heck of a lot of analysis about Vista, Windows 7, and (of course) Apple.

Vista?! Damn near killed ‘im!

Bruce Schneier and mordaxus, a fellow Bruce Schneier links to in the same post, discuss Vista’s lack of uptake from a security (or not) perspective. John Gruber wrote up a piece about it, too, to which Marco Arment responds.

That’s a lot to read, but I recommend all of it, if you have the time. It’s all thought provoking, whether or not you agree with the premises or lines of argument.

Despite all the speculation and pontificating, nobody can really summarize, with facts and figures and studies, why Vista bombed so hard, exactly. And I think people will still be talking about what the heck went on with Vista for kind of a long time— it still amazes me, frankly, because I’m used to a world where people buy what Microsoft puts out and that’s that.

As a side note, what really drove it home for me was seeing Dell offering machines that came with Vista but were “pre-downgraded” to XP. Pre-downgraded! It sounds like a joke, but that’s real. That actually happened! People complained so bad that they couldn’t give it away.

XP versus Win7: FIGHT!

Let’s be honest, though. Whether you love or hate Microsoft, despite all this, they’re not going anywhere. Windows XP has an enormous installed base. Netbooks are selling like hotcakes and evidence suggests that Linux is a non-starter. Some people would argue that it won’t last, but that remains to be seen.

So what we have here, perhaps, is simultaneously a race to the bottom with PCs and netbooks. It blows my mind that you can go to dell.com and get a reasonably powerful PC with everything you’d need— yes, a monitor, even— for less than $600. But you can! Or perhaps you’d like a quad core machine with 6gb RAM for ~$475? They’re really cheap and I think we’re well past the point where people expect not to pay all that much for a Windows machine.

The stratospheric growth behind netbooks is another extremely convincing data point. As Joe Wilcox puts it, netbooks are a plague. They’re poisoning notebook growth even as their own growth outpaces same. People want cheap PCs!

Now, of course, it could be that people are just buying netbooks on top of whatever PCs they own. They retain their PCs with XP because It Already Works and a netbook is an extremely cheap alternative to a notebook. And that netbook is almost certainly running XP, by the way!

I think it’s up in the air as to what people do with their main machine, if anything, since a machine you’ve bought within the last four years or so can do what most people need: YouTube, Facebook, photos, and e-mail. Upgrading is most likely a quantitative difference than a qualitative difference. Throwing $500 down for a faster machine doesn’t really make your internet experience $500 better, in other words.

A new challenger? Um. Maybe.

Now let’s talk about Apple. Apple made a whole lot of money. They made a lot more money than many analysts expected. As I mentioned, there’s this and also this. And there’s also Apple’s sales figures. Where does this leave us?

In my opinion, it’s a very, very interesting time. Vista set a precedent that Microsoft’s operating systems do, in fact, have legitimate competitors. It’s just that it happens to be Windows XP. Vista couldn’t beat it, and although there’s lots of analysis up, no one’s completely sure why. The consensus seems to be that it was annoying, slow, not as-advertised, and generally didn’t offer any perceived value.

So far, Windows 7 is getting good reviews. (Hang on a second! What kind of reviews did Vista get? As it turns out, most reviews were quite favorable, esp. relative to how poorly it did.)

More than that, though, I’ve actually had a chance to use it on a relatively new machine that used to run Windows XP. I like it as much as I’ve ever liked any Windows OS, and it seems like a solid operating system. I went for the cheap upgrade through Microsoft, and I’ll install it when I get my installation keys.

Furthermore, Amazon is saying that Windows 7 is the biggest preorder product of all time. Yes, that’s even with the Harry Potter books. Now that Win7 is officially out, I imagine OEMs will start shipping it with their netbooks, and this time Microsoft has had a chance to prepare an operating system better suited than Vista or XP.

Nevertheless, folks upgrading from XP to Win7 face what can only imagine is an enormous hassle. All of those people— those people that vastly outnumber Vista users— will have to wipe their XP drive. Maybe it won’t be so bad and maybe I’m unimaginative, but I really can’t see how this could end well. Millions of people reformatting their computers and installing a new operating system? Really?

Quit stalling! Where does that leave us, god dammit?

Oh right. I didn’t answer that question. I don’t know.

I don’t expect Apple to gain a whole bunch of market share from this. But dang did they make a lot of money! And their announcements this week weren’t so much to upstage Microsoft— regardless of what Apple does, an OS release entails much more sustained press. Rather, they’re reminding everybody that they’re around, they’re doing really well, and check out all this shiny new hardware! Given this and the above, Apple’s trash talk about Windows 7 driving more people to Macs begins to look a more convincing.

Anyway, Apple’s kind of a serious contender now, in terms of profit. Like Joe Wilcox says, Apple makes money off of all of their machines while OEMs and Microsoft make dwindling amounts of money off of netbooks. The point that’s easy to forget is that Apple doesn’t have to win everybody, or even a really large percentage of people— they make a substantial amount with each sale, enough that they can afford to whittle away at the rest of the industry.

What does this mean in practical terms? I don’t know. If Windows 7 doesn’t do all that well, Microsoft is in kind of a bind, and understandably so. Supporting three different OSs has got to suck. And XP is coming up on a decade old by this point. And people sticking with their current machines and/or XP means Microsoft makes a lot less money, and OEMs, too, perhaps.

As far as Apple is concerned? I don’t know what the hell Apple is going to do with all that money. Maybe they’ll just sleep on piles of it. Whatever they do, it’ll be interesting.

kthxbai

Well, that’s a really long post. I didn’t intend for it to run this long. Dang.

Throwing in Knoppix or running Ubuntu live is a great way to get around this problem. Although I’m sure it’s possible to exploit the OS while it’s running in memory, the current operating system installed base climate means that the odds are enormously against it, even when you set aside the added security of a GNU/Linux OS running ephemerally, in read-only mode.

Ultimately, however, I have such mixed feelings about this situation. Among the worst outcomes I see is that people get really paranoid about doing anything with computers because it could screw them over. That’s bad for everybody in the computing industry, and, frustratingly, it doesn’t have to be that way.

I’ll admit that insinuating anything about the way things “should” be is a recipe for trouble. I may work in the software industry, but let’s face it: I’m mostly self taught, and I don’t know shit relative to plenty of people. Furthermore, speculating about how things “should” be is a lousy practice— that way lies madness or, if you prefer, wank. It’s a losing proposition.

What I mean to say is that computers don’t have to be this terrifying thing that they are, and yet I’m feeling a bit paranoid about my own machine even reading this. And I consider very computer literate!

At any rate, reading this article left me wondering: what’s the endgame, here? It’s a question I’ve become fond of asking about many situations (e.g. the healthcare debate in the United States). The situation regarding mainstream computer security is clearly untenable.

Linux offers something of a solution, but the user experience is brittle and don’t see anybody heading in that direction anytime soon. Perhaps news like this combined with similar advice from banks will push people in that direction. Mostly, I doubt it.

In my opinion, Mac OS X offers the best compromise, but only as long as it remains obscure. After that, it’s anybody’s guess. Sure, they’ve got a leg up in that they’re running BSD. Beyond that, I think they’re largely untested due to the fact that it’s vastly more efficient to exploit Windows machines.

As with so many things, this is one area in which only time will tell. In the meantime, maybe I’ll reconsider relegating Linux to a headless machine. I’ve got some spare parts lying around, after all. How much is a socket 775 motherboard these days?