Vista was so awful users would “upgrade” back to XP, and it never gained more than 19% installation based. Apple jumped on this with blatantly mocking (and successful) ad-campaigns to woo users burned by Vista.
But now, Apple seems to have done a remarkable job of causing me to do a 180. OS X Lion (or 10.7 in more logical terms) seems like a massive step back in usability for something named after the king of the jungle.
Now that we’re on 10.7.2, it’s more stable, at least. I haven’t had to reboot it due to issues for a while. In my mind the biggest mess from the Lion release Apple has yet to fix is Safari. A lot of technology companies seem to be infected with fixing what ain’t broken syndrome. Apple now seems to be one of them. I just installed an update to Safari that I sincerely hope will address some of the stability problems.
I also agree with Eric on the reversed scrolling thing. I think it’s actually is more natural on a trackpad. On a mouse not so much, but I think Apple has determined the mouse to be passé.
Clayton is offering advice on telescopes for Christmas. This is kind of timely, because after our star tour to the top of Mauna Kea last year, I’ve been thinking I should get one. But it’s a daunting topic. Reflector or refractor? And which kind? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Do I want one that would be easy to schlep to Hawaii? I’d definitely need one that would be easy to transport, because there’s not a whole lot that be seen sandwiched here between Philadelphia and New York.
I’ve also thought that astrophotography would be pretty cool, but I’m guessing pretty expensive as well.
Industry officials told Aviation Consumer that the market will likely reject significant increases in cost for apps and online products. Smaller providers and free websites may simply go out of business. Larger companies may try to keep their subscribers but with higher subscription prices. The pervasive fear in the industry is that this could lead to only one or two entities controlling the market for the distribution of government-produced information that is essential for flight safety. Aeronav spokeswoman Abigail Smith told Aviation Consumer the agency is determined not to let that happen but the new fees, whatever they are, will have to be enough to cover costs.
I understand trying to cover costs, so less taxpayer money is required to fund this part of FAA, but why not just charge for individual access, rather than routing access through a handful of vendors with contracts? By making some buyers more equal than others, the large players are guaranteed to be the primary beneficiaries.
With the lot that’s running the country now, you have to wonder if someone is getting paid off. It’s the Chicago Way.
Even Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers are capitalizing on the black rifle phenomena? We are truly winning. I challenge our opponents to say otherwise. The AR-15 is mainstream now. Even if this is marketed to the Counterstrike Kiddies (is that even current terminology among the kids these days?) we’re still winning.
I am pleased to have gotten a link from Instapundit yesterday, which brought in some traffic to give the new server a bit of a test. We seem to have held up well.
I have circled the load under Instalanche, which did not even really make the server break a sweat. We don’t max out until 400%. Monitoring the number of new incoming TCP connections looks pretty good as well:
Again, not too out of the ordinary. The previous server was a Core2Quad, and this is a Quad-core Xeon. I think the big difference is the fact that I have a lot more RAM, so I’m able to run more apache processes simultaneously, which allows for servicing a larger number of clients. I have also greatly improved caching in the new server. Aside from the hacking attempt, I am pleased with the upgrade. Even better that the upgrade was thanks to salvaged hardware that didn’t cost me anything.
My network graph shows barely a blip. Granted, this was a weekend link, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest the new server is robust enough to handle a weekday Glenn link with more room to spare.
Not digging it. Apparently I’m not alone in this. I used to use bloglines, but they were so unreliable, I switched over to Google Reader,which was much better. It seems like every online provider is getting into the business of fixing what ain’t broken.
When I was in college, I was a member and pseudo-leader of a group called the DUsers, which was actually the first Mac user group in the country, founded at Drexel University in 1984. There are other groups that will also claim to be the first, but they are blasphemers with no evidence to back up their claim. My friend Jason, who has occasionally co-blogged on here, wrote a Shareware game for the old black and white Macs, and last I heard still had a check from Steve Wozniak somewhere, who apparently thought his game was pretty cool and decided to pay for it. The DUsers were absorbed into another student group a number of years ago, and I don’t know what’s happened to them since. I also don’t know what happened to a lot of our vintage archival material.
Once being a Mac user went from being Geek to Chic, a lot of the old user groups died out, and while the Apple community has gained substantially, it has lost something in becoming the “in” thing. I was part of the community when Apple was getting steamrolled by Microsoft, and being an Mac aficionado was something a bit odd, rather than stylish. It is in that spirit I share this with you. It is classic Steve Jobs. Cordial, and at the same time arrogant, but also speaking the brutal truth:
For those of us who were Mac users during the days of John Scully, Michael Spindler, and Gil Amelio, what could also be charitably referred to as “the dark years,” it’s hard to imagine what Apple will be like, once again, without Steve Jobs at the helm. Does Tim Cook have the minerals? We shall see. Google is a much tougher competitor than Microsoft ever was, and operating systems, at this point, are easily commoditized.
Those of us that have been around the Apple world for a while might remember that before Apple bought NeXT back in 1996, it was also rumored to be flirting with Be Inc, maker of the BeBox, which ran BeOS. Be was lead by Jean-Louis Gassee, who was probably every bit Job’s equal when it came to personality. Gassee was once famously, and humorously quoted as saying:
“For God’s sake, don’t compare us to NeXT. We want to be a better tool for developers, not to be tasteful. We don’t cost $10,000. We have a floppy drive. We do not defecate on developers.”
Of course, Apple ultimately bought NeXT, rather than BeOS, and Steve Jobs proceeded to rearrange the Apple board, and orchestrate his return to the helm. How different of a world it would be today if instead of bringing back Steve Jobs with Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, they had bought Be Inc, and with it Jean-Louis Gassee?
I got the play-by-play on the first non-Steve product release. First part of the presentation was how they had caught up to Android. Jobs never would have done that. Trying to edge other products and play “me-too, only better” was what Apple did during the Gil Amelio days, and it didn’t work out too well for them.
The improvements in the camera are welcome, and I think they are going in the right direction with the speech technology. I don’t really give a crap about being able to speak searches, or have a device take dictation, but being able to set and review appointments via voice, or to get updates on weather and traffic via voice would be a great help.
Apple is very proud of Lion. Initially I didn’t think Lion was too bad, but it’s a horrible release. It’s buggy as hell, and Safari is now full of quirks and bugs, whereas it was one of the cleanest browsers out there.
I will probably get an iPhone 4S, but only because I currently still have a 3G (not even the 3GS) with a screen that has streaks of failed pixels all through it. But I worry Apple is headed back down the road to being “me too, only better” while chasing everyone else instead of really innovating.
Perhaps history will repeat itself a bit here. After Apple release the Macintosh (which was truly innovative in the same way iOS was, in that Apple stole/bought the technology from Xerox/Fingerworks), quickly had the technology stolen by competitors (Microsoft/Google), Steve was booted/left for health reasons, leaving Apple to slowly wither as their competitors killed their market share as Apple lost ground in the gadget race.
Only this time it could be worse. Windows 3.0 was a piss poor knockoff of MacOS. Up until Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft arguably had a product that was inferior on nearly every way, and despite the flaws of MacOS at the time, I still largely preferred it to NT 4.0′s user interface. Android is a stellar implementation of the ideas originally pioneered by Fingerworks, and later bought by Apple. Google is also a lot smarter than Microsoft. Apple is going to have to impress people better than they did yesterday if they want to hold on to their market share, which means the iPhone 5 is going to have to introduce something very new.
UPDATE: Speaking of the early Windows NT reminds me, nothing is really all that new, even in technology. It’s kind of like guns in that regard. Microsoft produced NT by snatching away all the top operating system developers from Digital Equipment Corporation. Because of that, it’s long been believed that Windows NT (now just called Windows) still retains an awful lot of VMS-like constructs, and that its internals are very similar to VMS. MacOS is really just a candied up version of NeXTStep, that was developed by all the same people who were brought in when Apple bought NeXT. And even NeXT was just a mach microkernel with parts of BSD Unix grafted on.
As someone who spends about 14 hours a day in front of a keyboard on a good day, workstation ergonomics is something I’ve done a good bit of experimentation with. Clayton Cramer seems to have been having some wrist problems, but believes that the Microsoft Natural line of keyboards helps a lot. I used a Microsoft Natural 4000 for a few years to help with wrist issues, and it is indeed good, and one of the better split keyboards out there.
But I’ve discovered through trying various techniques that key travel distance has more of an effect on how hard a keyboard beats up your hands, wrists, and arms as using a split keyboard does. After several years of using the Apple “chiclet” keyboards, I find them to be quite easy on the hands and wrists, despite the fact that they aren’t split. This is doubly true if you add a beanbag wrist rest to the equation. I think this is because the travel distance on the chiclet keys are so short, and as such doesn’t require as much work and movement from the fingers to depress the keys. When I go back to a regular PC keyboard, or even the Natural Keyboard, I can feel my fingers having to work a lot of harder to type. One other thing I like about the chiclet keyboard is that it’s easy to keep clean, preventing it from looking gross and crusty after a couple of years.
To go with any keyboard setup, you also need a good chair. I have been using one of these Aeron chairs for seven years. They are expensive, and infamously associated with failed .com companies (which is where my previous employer got them from at pennies on the dollar), but after using this chair, I will sit on no other. They are comfortable and rugged. At the end of our company, I got to take mine home, plus a broken one I intend to fix and take to my next job. The main drawback to the Aeron chair is that they don’t do well on plush carpet, so a chair mat is a must. Though from the pictures, it looks like they may have fixed the carpet problem in later models.
When I was in college, I was a member and pseudo-leader of a group called the DUsers, which was actually the first Mac user group in the country, founded at Drexel University in 1984. There are other groups that will also claim to be the first, but they are blasphemers with no evidence to back up their claim. My friend Jason, who has occasionally co-blogged on here, wrote a Shareware game for the old black and white Macs, and last I heard still had a check from 
