g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est



Cars without compromise.



Book Plugs:




Buy 'em and I get
money. I think.
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12/31/2001 -   1/6/2002
12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001
Saturday, April 18, 2009
06:06 - We Build Excitement
http://i.gizmodo.com/5215485/words-can-explain-dell-design-only-so-well

(top)
Dell's VP of Consumer Design "pitches" the Adamo and other new Dell laptops. Via JMH.

I don't know if I'm unusual in this, but—well, I'm trying to picture using one of these things, and I'm sorry, but the attention to detail and build quality aren't that much of a selling point for me, for one simple reason: the damn thing still runs Windows.

When you're using a computer of any kind, 90% of the experience is in the operating system, at least when you're sitting down and getting work done. The physical features, connectivity, keyboard layout, and other attributes are only relevant if you're comfortable enough with the experience presented by the software that you can fine-tune your interaction with it beyond simple typing and clicking.

I've had the displeasure of using a whole variety of Dell laptops at work recently, and they've all blended into a miasma of "blah", no matter how top-end or allegedly well-built and well-designed they are. The whole experience is overwhelmed by a haze of Windows that settles over the vicinity—never mind the blue-glowing power connector or the two (!) sets of mouse buttons, I'm primarily concerned here with the tedium of force-quitting crappy apps that don't die when you tell them to and having to click six tiny things to "Safely Remove Hardware" and the fact that when you duplicate a file it names the new one "Copy of..." rather than "... (copy)" so it goes to some totally different place in the alphabetized list and why the friggin' thing refuses to run a pcap through tcpreplay at any more than 1/3 the original capture speed.

I could be happy using Mac OS X on a plastic Acer that's been run over by a car. Putting effort into dressing up the Adamo so it has decorative exhaust vent holes and smooth aluminum keys isn't going to convince me to buy one, because no matter how shiny the brass is, the Titanic is still going down.



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© Brian Tiemann