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Sunday, October 26, 2003 |
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WHAT "Good Old Days"?Unless you're a hermit living in a cave, you probably interact every day with one or more computers. Remember when banks used to close shortly after noon so they could get their books in order by the time people went home at 5? Computers have eliminated the need to do that. For better or worse (and it's a little of both) we could not live the way we do had computers not become widely available. The first "computer" was called ENIAC. It filled a room, required a team of technicians to run it, and had less power and less storage capacity than the Handspring Treo that fits in my pocket. The Treo also serves as a phone, which ENIAC didn't. The Treo also saves all my login IDs and passwords, which ENIAC wouldn't have -- partly because login IDs and passwords for computers didn't exist then and partly because I didn't exist then, either. This week, the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica (complete with "movies", illustrations, and pictures arrived on a single DVD. I installed the whole thing (4.1 GB) on my hard disk because I have plenty of space (2 120GB drives). Fifteen years ago (give or take) I would have paid well over $1,000,000 for that kind of storage and it wouldn't have fit in my house or run on the available electric circuits. (Well, no, I wouldn't have paid over $1 million for that kind of disk space; but if I'd had the money, I could have.) As for the encyclopedia itself, my parents "invested" (encyclopedia sales-speak) in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in about 1963 and I still have it. The books probably cost more than $1000 in 1963 dollars (minimum wage about $1, expensive cars went for about $2500, and gasoline was 25 cents per gallon.) Britannica lists the DVD at $70, but it is widely available for $25, which is what I paid. In Tucson at PowerPointLive, the best Internet connection I could get from my hotel room was 21.6Kbps, so I carried the computer down to the conference's help center and glommed on to the WiFi connection at 10Mbps. I thought I was being inconvenienced. My website host (also used by several clients) has been dealing with a distributed denial of service attack for the past week and I've encountered occasional site outages. The longest was about 6 hours, overnight, the first day of the attack; others have been 15-30 minutes. E-mail service has been slightly affected. We're all just terribly distressed about the inconvenience. Wow! Inconvenienced? Really. Because I can't receive e-mail for a couple of hours? Acquaintance Donna Melton who lives in the islands west of Seattle and uses a ferry boat to get to the mainland commented on Thursday about all the things we take for granted:
Taking things for granted? Who? Me? ENIAC?By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. (http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html) Macs for the geek setWho are all these people and why are they saying such nice things about Apple? Could the new G5 Macs, coupled with OS X 10.3 (Panther), attract a following of people who have, for the past 20 years, said little or nothing good about Apple? People like me, for example? This is something I hinted at several months ago. If you've been following the story at Technology Corner, I decided to buy a Mac a little more than two years ago. The operating system that was installed as the primary boot system on my G3 notebook computer was called System 9 and it quickly confirmed my opinion of the Mac: A system with an over-rated "easy" operating system that couldn't begin to compete with machines running Windows NT to say nothing of competing with XP. If that was the best Apple had, I thought, it was clear why Apple had only about a 5% market share at the time. But the machine came with OS X 10.0 and that was what I really wanted to see. Unix is a solid, stable operating system. I wondered what Apple would be able to do with Unix because the Unix command line is terse and cryptic. How would Apple users, some of whom have never even seen a command line be able to deal with Unix. As it turns out, OS X users who don't want to see a command line will never have to see it. The graphical interface takes care of most users' needs. But even that was a little disappointing. Version 10.0 had a lot of gaping holes where pieces of the operating system should have been. Version 10.1 followed almost immediately and I picked up a free CD at the Apple Store in Easton. That was an improvement and I could see where Apple was headed with its new operating system. About then I began to give the Mac some grudging respect. I began to find things to like, although I never did buy the "it's easier to use" claims from Cupertino. Apple's next step was OS X 10.2 and it was a quantum leap from 10.1. Some Apple users grumbled about having to shell out $100+ for a "0.1" upgrade and my opinion was that Apple should have called it version 11 or at least 10.5. Of course, that was back when I thought that "X" was pronounced like the letter (because Unix and Linux are known as the "x" systems). The fact that X is also the Roman numeral for 10 struck me as little more than a happy coincidence. Later I found that the "X" is pronounced "ten" and that creates a problem for the next major version. "OX ten version 11"? I don't think so! X is "ecks"? No! X is "ten"!It may be that Apple is trying to stretch out the "X" (ten) for a decade or more while they try to figure out how to deal with the numbering. Apparently there has been some talk in the user community about pronouncing "X" as "ecks", which would easily allow for OX Ecks (Unix) 11 or 12 or even 105.73. Somewhere around version 10.2, I could see interest beginning to build among the geek community. I'm typing this report at Port Columbus on an iBook that's running OS X 10.2.6; by the end of the month, 10.3 will be shipping. The previews I've seen of the new system (code named Panther) make it appear to be another quantum leap. Users will have to pay $100+ for this new version, too, but there may be less grumbling this time as users grok* that Apple's OS number changes very little while the OS changes a lot. But there's an additional consideration for geeks: The new G5 computers are high-performance machines. They are among the first few 64-bit personal computer CPUs. Generally speaking, more bits mean faster processing. Early personal computers used 8-bit processors. Then came 16-bit processors and now today's 32-bit processors. There have been other 64-bit processors on the market, but not for computers you'll find in someone's home or office. AMD has a 64-bit processor now. So does Intel. Macs for geeksThe geek crowd (even writers for magazines that cater to the "Wintel" crowd) have been looking at the G5 machines and saying nice things. Add a powerhouse operating system to remarkably fast hardware and the result is a line of geeks who want to take a look and who, having taken a look, may well take a Mac home with them. And that would be an exciting thing for Apple and for the computer geeks of the world. There's an old saying that corporate successes have embedded in them the seeds of their own destruction. Information Week editor in chief Bob Evans recently wrote a column in which he reminded Microsoft that their chief goal should be to make life easier for their customers. "[I]n the battle to marginalize, isolate, stigmatize, and perhaps even cripple Linux, it's not going to be just Linux that bears the brunt of your assaults. It will be thousands of your customers." Information Week surveyed 400 business-technology executives and nearly 90% (352) said that they want help making Windows and Linux work together. Evans notes that companies will install both operating systems, which is simply common sense. Linux and Windows are complementary. Companies may deploy more Apple computers than in the past, too, and in locations outside the advertising and graphics departments. Now that Apple has a real operating system, Macintosh computers can fit easily into the corporate environment. So now Unix, Linux, and Windows need to cooperate with each other. Linux and Apple's OS X work just fine together. Maybe I should say that again and say it loud enough for some of the folks in Redmond to hear it: Linux and Apple's OS X work just fine together. An office full of Mac G4 and G5 systems with either one of Apple's servers or a Linux server could render Windows irrelevant. I don't see that happening anytime soon because no reasonable business owner or manager would toss out a building full of functioning Windows PC; but a reasonable business owner or manager might look at Microsoft's security record and begin to think that the company might be served better by a mix of Windows computers, Macs, and (yes) Linux machines. This is no big deal because Mac users have been creating websites from the beginning of the Web, but it is a big deal for me: I wrote and prepared this week's entire program synopsis entirely on an iBook. Before uploading the file, I moved it to my primary Windows machine for final formatting -- but that's only because the Dreamweaver template and cascading style sheet files aren't (yet) present on the Mac. The desktop is still Microsoft's home turf today. That might not be the case in 10 years.
Nerdly NewsZoneLabs teams with Cloudmark to stop spamUnfortunately, Cloudmark's SpamNet works only with Outlook and Outlook Express. If you use a more secure e-mail application, SpamNet won't work for you. Because I will not use Outlook or Outlook Express, I haven't seen SpamNet in operation, but the company says it hopes to soon offer an application that will work for other e-mail programs. Also unfortunately, both ZoneAlarm and SpamNet work only on Windows PCs. When Cloudmark becomes available for standard e-mail clients, I'll test it. If called by a Panther, you should anther!Apologies to the late Ogden Nash, but when Apple names its latest operating system "Panther" I can't resist. Apple started selling OS X 10.3 ("Panther") at 8 Friday evening. You'll pay $129 for a single license upgrade or $199 for a "family pack" of 5 licenses. Anyone with more than a single Mac (who wants to remain legal) will want to go with the "family pack". Apple will probably catch more criticism for charging $130 for a ".1" upgrade. I was in that chorus last time, but won't be this time -- except maybe at the edges. The previous ".1" upgrade added more than 100 features to the operating system. This upgrade adds another 150 (by Apple's count) and the improvements will probably justify the cost. Why does Apple do this to itself?As I've said previously, some long-time Apple users I've talked to suggest that Apple made a mistake in demanding that OS X be pronounced "OS Ten". Pronouncing X as the letter X would make sense because of the underlying Unix base. Pronouncing the X as "ten" means that eventually Apple will have an operating system called OS Ten 11.0. For a clever company with a lot of foresight, using X as Ten is just plain dumb. So now Apple is stuck with version creep, possibly because they're trying to stretch out "Ten" as long as they can while they try to figure out what to call the next full-number version. There would have been a lot less criticism last time if Apple had jumped the version to 10.5 and, from the looks of the changes this time, version 10.3 could plausibly be called 11.0. Ah, well. They can worry about that in Cupertino. What's in OS X 11.3 (Panther)?I don't have a copy yet, but Apple's website notes that the Finder is "completely new". That would be like replacing the Windows Explorer on a Windows PC. Not a trivial change. Apple has also added a feature called Exposé to tile open windows and let you find running applications. (As much as I like OS X, desktop management to date has been far behind what I'm used to on a Windows XP machine.) The iChat (yawn) feature now offers (yawn) video. If I want to chat with someone, I'll use the phone. It's faster and easier than typing. Fast user switching will allow more than one person to use a Mac. OK, you can do that now, but one user must log out so the other can log on. It's a time-waster and Windows has allowed fast switching since the advent of XP Pro. (I hope Apple's implementation of this feature is better than Microsoft's which sucks.) Those are just a few of the new features Panther brings to the table. For Windows users, there's still no "must have" feature that will be compelling enough for them to trash their machines and rush to the Apple store, but the features should be sufficiently enticing that most OS X owners will upgrade. And when computer replacement time rolls around, maybe a few more PC owners will become Mac owners. Let us know what you think about this program! Write to: |
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