Advantages

• Vim keybindings for 70% – 90% of the commands I use (e.g. ci(, marks, :w)
• Find in files
• Cmd-R to jump to a symbol
• Command-T-style fuzzy completion of filenames via Cmd-P
• Projects (i.e. a list of files spread across disparate dirs accessible via Cmd-P)
• Menu commands executable through Cmd-Shift-P, complete with fuzzy matching
• A sensible configuration & plugin language
• Fast. Buttery smooth.
• Linux AND Mac compatibility
• One license, all of your machines

It’s not that Vim can’t do most of this stuff (modulo the sensible configuration language). It’s that all of the above works out of the box. There’s a litany of things that I’ve just never quite gotten to work right. For instance, CommandT worked for a while and then broke. I don’t mean to pick on anybody. But this was not uncommon.

That was perhaps the single biggest reason that I switched.

At another point, I was trying to fix bugs in a dozen or so Python scripts, themselves scattered across three or more different subdirectories at various depths. In ST2, I added all three dirs to my project, and I bounced between them with Cmd-P quickly and easily. It just worked. And it’s fast. It breaks my heart to say it but Vim felt positively medieval in comparison.

I also look forward to learning how to write plugins. I’ve never been able to convince myself to learn Vim’s scripting language.

There are some disadvantages worth mentioning.

Disadvantages

1. Split-pane isn’t as good as Vim
2. Inaccessible via the Terminal
3. Not libre or gratis
4. I may run into cognitive dissonance wrt Vim bindings

With ST2, you have to switch between a canned set of layouts rather than being able to ad-hoc split pane. With Vim, I have anywhere from 3 – 5 panes open, and with ^W and some handy \ew aliases (edit file in same working dir as this file), it’s mostly muscle memory.

I can’t use ST2 in the Terminal, which means I’ll have to fallback to Vim. That’s not the end of the world, but it is inconvenient.

I hesitated for weeks, having taken it for a test drive for some of the toying around I’ve done with Go. But it wasn’t about FOSS. It was about the price. Why pay for a text editor when there are N free ones available?

That said, I am willing to pay a little bit of money to get the job done. (Shit, if time is money, it’s already saved me a ton of time.) And I know that I’m supporting a small and independent developer. I want to live in a world where people can make money off of developing kick-ass software.

Vintage (the plugin for ST2 which adds Vim keybindings) does have some limitations. “, double grave, doesn’t work right. g; and g, don’t work. I’m sure I’ll run across more.

Conclusion

It’s been some weeks since I switched, and I haven’t really looked back. If you’ve got the dough and you’re looking for an editor that’ll help you step your game up, I recommend you check out Sublime Text 2. As I said, it’s a free trial.

When Lion came out, I decided to check out the state of the art in ostensibly user-friendly (read: GUI) email clients. I don’t pretend to know much about how Apple Mail It was purely curiosity. But a number of issues have cropped up in my mind.

• Gmail can get really bloated, memory-wise. I was surprised when Mail took up less than 200MB; I assumed all mail clients routinely took up at least twice as much. Gmail often takes up something north of 500MB. (I suppose Chrome doesn’t help, if only because its multiprocess model necessarily involves a RAM tax.) Part of this is that I keep it open all the time, or rather I used to; now I feel obligated to close it now and then to keep my RAM clear. On balance, I don’t want to care about RAM, but in practice I feel I have to. I share a laptop with my -girlfriend- wife, which means Gmail effectively occupies 1GB or more. Running a Minecraft server on my desktop machine means I’m consistently down by 1GB, at least until I move it off.

• The idea of having my mail on every machine is less of a concern now. Chiefly this is because I have a smartphone; if I don’t have a laptop with me, I always have my phone. IMAP means that changes on one client propagate elsewhere automatically, whether it’s on the phone, the iPad, or a full-fledged computer.

• I can use an email client offline. This doesn’t happen that often, admittedly, and when I am completely offline I’m typically on vacation. Still, there were a couple of occasions recently where my connectivity was poor enough to make Gmail sluggish. A mail client simply had to download my messages once and I could read and search all of them without hitting the server via my flaky connection.

• An email client is consistently faster when it comes to common UI operations. This is not to say that Gmail is slow, at last not most of the time. Most of the time, it’s fast enough. But when it’s not, it’s quite frustrating when a simple search takes longer than it really should! Contrariwise, once a client downloads my mail, I’m not subject to network delays. Yes, the client can be slow due to limitations of my machine, but those same constraints apply to the browser as well. Furthermore, the difference between searching my mail via Gmail and on my own machine continues to narrow, at least for me.

• With Gmail + IMAP, I have the best of both worlds. I can check mail via a browser should I need to, but should I have the need, I can use the client. This is the strongest point in favor of retaining Gmail, modulo other logistical issues: it does’t have to be either/or.

That said, there are some significant drawbacks, at least to Apple Mail in particular as well as Gmail/IMAP.

• Gmail/IMAP integration isn’t that great. Or maybe I should say that IMAP itself isn’t that great. It’s a folder-based paradigm, which treats emails like files. I think that’s ridiculous. IMHO, people only think about emails that way because it’s been thrust on them, and it’s not like most people understand the filesystem paradigm in the first place. Labeling/tagging a message is a “copy” operation, which is dumb. Archiving a message means “move to All Mail,” which is silly, too. Overall I’d say the mapping is somewhat leaky. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault in particular; I prefer Gmail’s model, but I wouldn’t expect Apple to sign on to that model wholesale.

• Your -filters- Rules don’t sync across multiple machines. It seems that previously you’d have to pay for MobileMe to get this, which is/was ridiculous. Perhaps iCloud will fix this? It would be surprising if it didn’t, esp. considering they’re offering a full-fledged email service as far as I can tell.

• The keyboard shortcuts aren’t nearly as good. Although there are hitches now and then, for the most part I can drive Gmail entirely through keyboard shortcuts. Mail’s keyboard shortcuts are merely OK.

All this really amounts to in terms of my behavior is that nowadays I often have Mail open on my personal machines. I don’t shy away from using Mail on iOS devices, either. Beyond that, I still use Gmail for chat and I use it for most email operations that aren’t simply reading or deleting. The thought remains that I could, if I really wanted to, make the switch. I’m just not sure what it would take for me to do it; certainly I have no reason to now or in the near future.

autocorrect

I didn’t realize this was going to be as big a deal to me as I thought. Actually, I’d forgotten about it entirely until I started writing a couple of blog posts. Thus I was pleasantly surprised when I realized the built-in autocorrect is actually pretty handy. The vast majority of the time it does the right thing! Were I using Vim to do most of my writing, it might not matter so much; Vim has so many handy motions that it’s easy to jump between words, sentences, and lines in order to fix mistakes quickly. For a standard (read: less arcane) input method like this one, though, I’ve only got the standard ctrl-a, ctrl-e, alt-left, alt-right, and so on. Having the OS correct the litany of stupid typos I make regularly helps.

I had sort of wondered why this wasn’t an OS feature in the first place. Input fields are common as mud and autocorrect has been a feature in word processors for a long, long time. So why isn’t it in the OS? Who knows? It is now.

Irrationally, I worry that a feature like this will erode my typing accuracy.

fullscreen apps

To some extent, I’m being conspicuous when I use them. There’s no real reason that I need to use Safari fullscreen while blogging. After all, Chrome is my main browser. But it does have a nice way of focusing my attention. I’m also trying out Apple Mail, and segregating it to its own space means I’m less likely to fidget with checking it.

mission control

I was a litte worried about Mission Control doing away with Snow Leopard’s way of laying out windows via Exposé. Leopard laid out windows sort of haphazardly and without obvious consistency. Snow Leopard made it into a grid layout, which made it a little harder to figure out which window was which but looked a lot neater and cleaner overall. Mission Control looks to restore it back to a semi-haphazard layout, grouped by application, which seemed like a loss of functionality.

What rescues it is the presence of a gesture for application-level Exposé. With that, I don’t have to Cmd-` my way through two or more Chrome windows. I’m not sure how useful Mission Control’s facility for selecting one or more of an app’s windows is, though.

launchpad

It’s pretty! I’ll give it that. But I am not sure how useful it is.

It looks like it finds all of your apps, which is a good thing overall. It’d be dumb if it didn’t.

However, putting them into iOS-style folders and whatnot is odd. For example, I’ve got a bunch of git clients (Tower, GitY, GitX, GitHub) sitting in my Applications folder. There’s also a Development folder in Launchpad. Except it actually corresponds to /Developer. When I moved my various Git.* apps around in Launchpad, it created /Applications/Developer which had only the Git.* apps in it.

Call it a leaky abstraction, I guess. Or a corner case, given that the majority of apps go under /Applications in any case.

scrolling, gestures

I’m fine with the new scrolling. I guess I’ve lived with it for a week, like I said I would, and I don’t feel like turning it off.

The gestures are kind of messed up out of the box, though. Two finger swipe for fwd/back is fine in theory but it doesn’t work at all in Chrome (expected; I presume they’d have to make a code change) or even System Preferences (!). It’s easy to switch it back to three finger swipe, and I did that.

I like the new scrollbars, although once again they’re hideous in Chrome. Chrome still has the old scrollbar gutter, and the gray scrollbar is always present. The Chrome team is working on it, or so I hear.

TTFN

That’s all I’ve got for now.

I sort of want to write something about Resume and whatnot, but I’m out of steam at the moment. Perhaps another time. John Siracusa’s excellent review of Lion covers this in more detail, and he probably says it better than I would anyway.

I’ve had some thoughts about this of and on, especially as far as the iPad is concerned. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had much the same thoughts: what potential such a device has for tabletop RPGs! Even if you assume only the DM has one, there are many possibilities.

I’m thinking mostly of what this could do for the DM, to be honest— I don’t imagine that enough people own such devices that you assume everyone in the group has a smartphone. There’s more you could do in that realm but I think we’re some ways away before something like that is feasible. In any case, that would have to be a web app, I think; the web is the only development platform smartphones have in common these days.

For D&D, the obvious advantage is data tracking augmented by automation. With a larger screen, an app to track various states and automate certain mechanics becomes much easier. You could have an application that allowed you to run combat much more easily by tracking status effects, marks, and so on. The possibilities are so obvious that it’s weird that Wizards is still absent from this space.

A new project?

In any case, I was excited enough about these possibilities to finally start learning Cocoa Touch. I’ve no idea if this will result in an actual product. For the time being, it’s a way to kill some time, to learn something new and write some code.

Seeing those apps I linked above cemented my desire to write something unrelated to D&D. The audience for D&D is broad enough that other people have tackled this, so my inclination is to focus more on narrative-driven games instead. While I’ll admit I haven’t sought it out much, it does seem to me that this area is somewhat under-represented in terms of their online presence. There’re some obvious reasons why that might be. Either way, it seems like an opportunity to me.

For instance, I’m often carrying a laptop to the table or a pile of index cards. I have notes for scenes, stats for NPCs, and so on. Tracking status effects, encounter powers, loot, and the like is far less of a concern and requires less math for games like the new World of Darkness. In concrete terms, there’s less of a need for automation and more need for an efficient system for data storage and retrieval.

Is this a worthwhile idea? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s enough that I think I would use such an app. The sticking point is that my games require a fair amount of improvisation. An app could be too heavyweight for that— why not just open a web browser to a website like Obsidian Portal, Wikia, or simply use a notepad app like Simplenote?

Another question is how much effort the development itself will be. I wouldn’t require someone to enter their game notes on their iDevice, which implies some manner of web-based data entry app. Does that mean I need to get cracking on something like AppEngine?

I also don’t know how difficult it is to get something up and running on the iP* (as my friends and I often refer to the iPhone OS devices). So, in the coming weeks I’ll continue playing around with Cocoa Touch, sketch out some ideas, and we’ll see what I come up with. If it turns out to be a stupid idea, I’ll still have learned something and broadened my coding horizons.

PDFs

I can’t help but think about the iPad in terms of gaming. For one thing, it seems like it’s a viable portable device for viewing PDFs. Not that I would advocate this, but if one were to acquire, say, PDFs of the old TSR books, one might find it somewhat more pleasant to read them on that sort of screen as opposed to a full-fledged laptop.

I know people have suggested a rich media experience for RPG books, and if the iPad takes off, this is the opportunity. Being able to buy eBooks or PDFs or what have you through iBooks could certainly tempt a lot of people into buying and reading RPG books, given the right price and enough of an installed base. (Of course, this assumes that it’s not just baby boomers, for example, that are buying them. We’ll see.)

Programs

For another, it’s programmable. There are a number of iPhone apps out there that are designed to assist either DMs or players. Oh, sure, there’s potential for networking them to do various bits of magic, but I see that as being a somewhat unlikely use case. Gamers are rare enough that the subset of technologically- or gadget- inclined gamers will be relatively small.

So, yes, gaming-related apps exist. But even outside of that, it’s far easier or natural to consult prep notes on a larger screen. It just comes down to sheer size: you can take in more information.

I do think that Wizards is leaving money on the table here, if you’ll forgive my office chair quarterbacking. I’m biased towards web apps, but that’s only because that’s the best way to ensure somebody can engage with something when they’re not at their “main” computer. Look at World of Warcraft’s Armory application for an example. It’s a standalone app that lets you shop for equipment for your character, and apparently they added Facebook integration recently. How’s that for maintaining engagement with the game even when you can’t actually play it?

Tiny Adventures is fun, but I’d up the level of interactivity a notch, especially to capitalize on the cooperative nature of D&D. I’d offer something similar to the Armory for your character, suggesting feats, powers, and equipment for a given character. Allow you to share the list of “recommended” items with the DM for your game so they can more easily choose magic items for your character.

Mobile is getting pretty big, too. While a full-bore character creation tool would be better suited to the iPad, you could still make a tool like that for the iPhone. Or a game that relied on a cooperative turn-taking, accessible either through an app or the web. People could play a cooperative D&D mini-game whether they’re on their phone, at work, at a coffee shop, or at home.

Obviously I don’t know what they’re doing, so I don’t know what’s in the works. But I remember hearing Mike Noonan mention in a podcast that they really should get into the iPhone app business. That was in 2008 or even earlier, if memory serves.

My guess is that it’s problematic to hire staff as specialized as this; the margins in the RPG industry can’t be that good, esp. if the annual December layoffs are any indication of WotC (or Hasbro’s?) position on retaining highly qualified or experienced employees.

eBooks

To get away from gaming for a bit, I’m not sure how I feel about eBooks, but I don’t think their future is very bright from a mainstream perspective. We know that, at least for now, eBooks are going to be in the ballpark of $15 rather than $10.

At first I couldn’t really figure out why they’d do this. It turns out that that was because I assumed publishers were in some other kind of trouble, either because of rising cost of paper, gas, or a decline in book sales (at least in aggregate if not for bestsellers, f’rex). If you remove that assumption, the goal here is to delay eBooks as much as possible. People who own Kindles may now think twice about buying eBooks. Anyone who buys a Kindle will probably factor that in, too.

What remains to be seen is how the iPad does. Amazon had leverage before Apple showed up. For my part, I think $9.99, the cost of a paperback, is a reasonable price for an eBook. With Apple on the scene, Amazon lost leverage and Apple gained some. They have a strong reputation as a device manufacturer, but I don’t think that’d be enough to bargain publishers down. And why should they do that, anyway? Apple’s willing to play ball if that means they can add another bullet point or two related to iBooks. If people buy eBooks at $13 a pop, then so much the better. If people keep buying glue-and-paper books, publishers continue to get a return on their printing and distribution infrastructure.

Another part to watch is, if the iPad takes off, what authors do. Small authors will have every incentive to get on board. Would published-but-not-bestsellers have an incentive to jump on board? I don’t know whether they typically sign exclusivity contracts nor how substantial the benefits to being published are if you’re not, say, Stephen King. I could see people throwing some of their works on iBooks or Kindle to see how well they sell. Jaded A-listers who command a large audience might opt out of the publishing model. They’d have to weigh that against what I presume are commensurately large advances, however.

In terms of mid-range publishers, I don’t know enough about the industry to even know if that exists. Entrenched publishers obviously have a disincentive to get in on this; if more people own e-readers, the barrier to entry vis a vis publishing is much lowered, which could put them out of business. But what about those folks who would put them out of business? If the big publishers aren’t on board but if a relatively large number of people own e-readers, does anyone have an incentive to step up and assist authors in promoting their eBooks? Would that even work?

Exciting times

We live in unpredictable and exciting times. Though they and their holding companies bear a large amount of responsibility for where they are, newspapers are in decline. Book publishers are in a much better place than they or the music industry ever were.

And of course there’s the ever-present digital divide. What happens to libraries, a highly accessible venue for people to read books they otherwise couldn’t afford? What happens when rich people can buy e-readers and poor people are stuck with whatever paper books remain?

Like I said: interesting times.

Oh, sure, if we’re talking about the actual device, I’m intrigued.

I decided a little less than a year ago that I had no interest in a netbook. The small form factor and low price were attractive. The keyboards were cramped; I didn’t want Yet Another Windows XP machine; and ultimately, I saw the lackluster performance firsthand. I could’ve gone for Linux, I suppose. My girlfriend’s netbook, originally an XP machine, now has a bunch of Linux Problems.

By contrast, I could see myself buying an iPad, either this generation or next. I own an iPod Touch and a Nexus One (disclosure: I work for the big G, meaning I received the latter as a Christmas gift). I frequently make use of one of my miniature devices, and while I enjoy the browsing experience, it could easily be improved.

Beyond that, I have some other thoughts.

Remember the iPod?

A pet peeve of mine is pronouncing that the device is DOA. I have no idea how well it will do, but some amount of perspective is in order, here. Only a very small set of people have actually used the device, and the ones that aren’t under NDA only got to use it for a little while.

Remember, too, that the iPhone lacked a great many features that the 3GS has today. An iPhone without apps is nearly unthinkable, given how prominent the App Store is these days. But the iPhone launched without one. It didn’t have GPS. Or cut-and-paste. Or even 3G.

The real clincher for me? Well, does anyone remember the original iPod launch? It launched in October of 2001. It was roundly criticized. People hated it! It was too expensive ($400). It supported FireWire only. It didn’t support Windows! Now, of course, the iPod is widely praised. It’s ubiquitous.

So that’s why I shake my head when I hear people talking about how this thing doesn’t do enough of this or that.

Closed systems

My biggest concern about the iPad and its potential popularity lies in the software. If we’re to infer from the iPad Apple’s vision of the future, it’s quite different from the world today. Apps are heavily controlled, meaning that whatever Apple doesn’t like won’t make it on to the device. That’s a huge difference.

Now, I am sympathetic to the reasoning behind this. Isn’t users running all kinds of unauthorized or sketchy software one of the biggest problems we face in computer security? A single repository of curated apps is an effective way to mitigate this problem, as well as a bunch of others that modern operating systems face.

And all right, sure: you can use web apps. And I use a heck of a lot of webapps. I spend most of my time reading RSS feeds and e-mail, both of which happen in a browser.

But in terms of the device, the iPhone is surely among the most locked down computing devices in the industry. It works out that, in this space, DRM is the rule, not the exception. You do with your device what Apple says you can, and no more.

E-readers

I don’t really care for e-readers, but I suspect that Amazon’s got a bit of a dilemma right now. As I understand it, most people probably aren’t interested in e-readers. But they are interested in netbooks, if netbook sales over the last year or so are any indication. Furthermore, if the rumors of a high return rate are to be believed, the iPad is pretty well positioned, price-wise and functionality-wise, to become a new standard among satellite computing devices.

For these people, the fact that it’s an e-reader will be one bullet point among many. E-books will be a couple of taps away in iTunes, which by the way keeps your credit card on file. That makes it fiendishly easy to buy music, apps, and now, ebooks.

Another question, of course, is price. I don’t mean the Kindle vs. the iPad. I think the iPad has it beat, if nothing else, in terms of value. The sole difference is whether eInk is worth sacrificing a full-fledged Internet device. I think most people will opt for a netbook-like device that, incidentally, is an e-reader.

No, by price I mean: will people pay $13 or more for an e-book? Amazon sells new hardcovers for, what, $9.99? It’s a reasonable price, I’ll admit. But I’m not sold on e-books myself, and I suspect most other people aren’t, either. An unscientific survey of Amazon’s best sellers indicates that the majority of books that people buy are either free or cost less than a couple of dollars. Is the iTunes e-book store liable to suffer the same fate? I think it might.

Ubiquitous Internet

I’d say that the thing that excites me most about the iPad, if I can be said to be excited, is the notion of ubiquitous Internet computing. That’s really just a fancy term for Internet everywhere. I’ve only recently stepped into the world of smartphones, and it’s lovely. It’s just too bad it’s so damn expensive to get something like that on your laptop, right?

WiFi is nice, but at the rate that municipal WiFi is taking over the world (cough), it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to use a WiFi-only device on the bus or the train.

Consequently, what excites me is a device I can carry anywhere, confident that it has an Internet connection. It would have to be big enough to read stuff on, but not as big as a laptop. And that’s roughly what the iPad is aiming at. If that’s the proposition, I’m very nearly sold.

TTFN

Beth is telling me to wait for v2, and given that we’re gearing up for some Big Things nowadays, that seems like the best bet. It won’t be out until June anyway, and in the meantime, I’d like to get the heck off of Windows as my main machine. (Latest anger point? Lack of RDP in Home Premium. Why should I pay $80 more for a single feature that, by all rights, should be free?)

Trouble is, sometimes I don’t stick with that, and I want to move all those tabs to a new window. Most browsers have drag & drop functionality, but that can be tricky to use. Pulling a tab off of a maximized window to make a new window means that when you try to drag another one onto the new window, the maximized window takes up focus.

In Windows, you can effectively tile your windows by selecting a window, holding down the Windows key, and pressing a direction. So I might Ctrl-N to create a new window, Win + Right to move it to the right, Alt-Tab back to the main window, Win + Left to move it to the left, and then start the drag-and-drop procedure.

All right, no more procrastinating.

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?