Smartwombat Blog

bad day for apple stuff

I had my iPod Nano crashing as well! It just silently restarted, while I was going to the next song. I am starting to think the problem must be with me. I guess I developed Reliability Distortion Field syndrome and Apple products are more sensitive for this then their Windows counterparts, hence the crashes.

The black screen of death

I guess I just lost another great illusion last evening. OS X - the world's most advanced operating system - just crashed on me. I was working using my beloved iMac and playing with Quartz Composer and suddenly the screen went black and the machine restarted as if the power disappeared and appeared. When OS X rebooted there were no dialogs telling me that it crashed and the reason of the crash and if I want to let know Apple about this accident. Strange. I can see this as a feature actually, let's just not stress the user further with dialogs that he will not understand or do not care to understand either. He is stressed enough already, let's just try to get back to work as soon as possible.

Disclaimer, I do not expect any software written by humans to be completely free from errors. Ever! I just heard so much about the greatest OS that I started to question even this basic axiom. :) 

I hate Macs...

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

I found this articleon Gurdian and had a good laugh! :)
I hate Macs.

Meet my new PC

Meet my new PC, it is a 20 inch iMac. I used "PC" instead of "iMac" or "Apple Computer" intentionally, because I do not wish to switch to the new OS. I am happy with Windows XP and looking forward for Vista. The reason why I picked iMac as my next PC, because I need a fast, quiet, high end PC what looks nice on my desk... I picked this one over a Dell, because for me iMac provided more value for money. 

The amount noise (lack of actually), the very nice display and that this machine is very compact are the killer features for me, but I would not purchase this machine if it could not run XP. Fortunately Bootcamp and Parallels are here to help me and I am currently evaluating which one to use for the future, but I might will end up using them both.

Regarding OSX, as geek of course I am interested to learn more about it, but after using it for a couple of days, I do not see anything earth shattering. It is a nice OS - Ooops I almost write overhyped, but I do not want thousands of Apple zealots to start spamming the comments of this article :) - it seems to be very polished. iLife is very nice and gadgets too. But I could not found anything what would make me switch from Windows. Apple for me is no more than a hardware vendor and all the nice design, the OS are for differentiate from the competitors. In this regards I give thumbs up for Apple and I am sure that there will be an Apple logo on my next laptop....