| Thursday, August 31, 2006 |
15:23 - Aww, poor baby
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2010376,00.asp
|
(top) |
How cute! Jim Louderback has been swayed to Stage 1 Mac Fandom: agreeing that OS X is pretty damned cool, and would rule the world if only Apple would stop being so thick as to refuse third parties to license it.
The reasons why they can't do so are legion and have been discussed many a time, so I won't. Just suffice it to say: Nice thought, but Apple doesn't want to rule the world. Jobs holds the One Ring and chooses to keep it well hidden. If he used it as a weapon, he would merely take his rival's dark throne. Not interested. Apple's making plenty of money as it is, and retaining the cachet of being a boutique brand used by the cognoscenti to boot.
Stage 2 Mac Fandom, incidentally, will be where Louderback buys a "Mac Pro PC" and runs it on his desk for a while, as a time-limited experiment; he'll write a series of articles striving to expose the warts of the Mac experience while making a few magnanimous nods to what it does well. Then he won't give it back at the end of the trial period.
In Stage 3, he'll start to appreciate the Mac's hardware design in print as well as in the brainstem, and he'll start touting the merits of various Linux flavors on the Mac, and the Windows virtualization method du jour, as a means of hedging against the jeers of his peers while he seeks for any justification for not having to go back to a Dell boat-anchor laptop. He might at this stage start to use his iPod's original white earbuds instead of a pair of third-party black ones intended to disguise his shame.
Stage 4 is where he will start to defend the actions of Jobs and Apple in his columns, in service of a corporate vision that he's starting to grasp, instead of attacking those actions as the unaccountable blundering of a company that seems able to make untold marvels spring to life only to set them on fire and smash them with axes out of some perverse primate fear of winning in the marketplace.
Stage 5: LouderMac.com.
UPDATE: Maybe Stage 1.5 will be where he stops saying things like "Core 2 Duo Extreme" and "Infinity Loop".
|
|
15:08 - Pour the WINE
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/
|
(top) |
Everybody's falling over themselves trying to figure out who can come closest to the Holy Grail of Windows functionality on a Mac within OS X. First it was Virtual PC, which was slow and crappy but the best anyone could do in emulation; but then with Intel came Boot Camp, and then Parallels, and then rumors of a Classic-like Windows environment in Leopard. But while the latter is vapor, CrossOver Mac is apparently real.
Essentially it appears to be WINE for Mac OS X, though that's hardly to belittle it; it seems to get the job done. It even supports 358 games. Real games, too, not just a million little clones of Solitaire and Tetris.
I've been using a MacBook Pro at my new job for this whole week, and Parallels is pretty slick; but the goal in running Windows is to run Windows apps, not to spend time booting up a virtualized Windows instance and bridging your devices and sucking up another DHCP address just beacause you need to run Visio. If you could just, you know, run Visio, that's 90% of what anyone needs to do in Windows anyway.
(The other 10%, and the sole reason why I installed a Parallels-ified copy of Windows on my machine, is to change your network password. Or so it would seem.)
|
|
Brian Tiemann
