Winter has finally found its way to Michigan. We have snow. And ice. And salt all over the roadways. Fortunately I have a remote control snowmobile (1/8 scale) to play with. :-)
I finally got around to installing Parallels and Ubuntu Linux on the MacBook Pro. First off, kudos to Parallels for making the software dang easy to use and run. And Linux, my friends, if Ubuntu is any guide, will start to make headway on the desktop. When? Oh within the next year I think we could see a percentage tick up. Say from .5% (I’m just making this up) to 1.5%. Will this effect Apple? Only if Apple stops innovating – any effects will be minor – Ubuntu is good, but it’s not Apple crazy-easy-good. Will this effect Microsoft? Oh yes. Vista, from the anecdotal reports I’ve heard, is just a souped up update to XP. With some annoying twists. Ubuntu’s UI and ease of use is, right now, better then my XP experience. For example, at work, today, I hooked up my USB Memorystick reader to download some photos. On a Mac, just plug it in, add the Memorystick and you’re ready to go! Not on XP. No – I just got that “new hardware added” message/noise. And then a Wizard pops up (in Ubuntu they hilariously call them “druids”). So I work my way through the wizard, it searches, and then finally reports “No drivers found” or “could not install” message. So I head out to the USB reader manufacturers site (PNY for the record) and look for drivers – I couldn’t find any. So I head to Sony and find some drivers for my Camera. I install that, no problem. But I now need to reboot. Logging back in after that, nope, my card reader still is driverless. So I run through the wizard again. Nope. So I try it in advanced mode, select what I think might be good options. And it does something and asks me to restart. So again, I patiently restart and log back in. Still no sign of the memorystick reader. So I now go into the devices manager and delete the driver/device I just installed because obviously it’s not working! I check PNY’s site once more and discover there are drivers – but they are only for Windows 98. They further state that it’s not needed for XP because XP natively includes support for USB devices. Oh really? Then how come my XP isn’t supporting my USB device? Anyways, I decide that I might as well try the installer because who knows it might just work? So I do. A reboot later and no my PNY reader still is unsupported. So I use the device manager to remove what damage I may have done. I then fiddle with the install new hardware Wizard and not more then 10 minutes later it “magically” discovers the proper drivers and installs them. I mean what the crap? Why didn’t it do this the first time around? Now Ubuntu, they have this really easy to use Package manager. That’s how you install and remove things. And it works very well. So well that I prefer it already to Windows XP in the less than a week that I’ve installed and used it. Microsoft has lots to fear. No wonder Microsoft’s working the patents, law and lawsuit angles – they don’t have time to innovate and improve. Linux is here.
And finally I leave you with a wonderful image of a cluster of cardinals. These birds are amazingly hard to get photos of as they seem to have an innate hatred towards photography and can just sense when your finger is pressing down…
The only problem I have ever had with WinXP and USB Mass Storage devices is when my work’s Information Services department did a crappy job installing Windows on some computers and actaully chose NOT to include the Mass Storage drivers. And yes, in that case it is hugely annoying. But generally, USB mass storage works great on Windows XP.
My guess is that Linux is still many years from making any meaningful impact on the desktop market, if it ever does. Just now, as I sit in the CSE dungeons, a friend of mine and I can’t figure out where Firefox on Linux decided to hide some files. Linux’s problem is, as always, that there are too many options, so nothing is uniform, and its hard to make things work without this uniformity.
This uniformity is also the genius and curse of Windows. It makes it easy to build products for Windows; it also makes it easy to build exploits of Windows. Apple sometimes seems like the best of both worlds, because it takes a more friendly-appearing/open-looking approach, but locks it down at several levels to prevent unmanageable explosions of options (ie, very restricted hardware, many fewer programs to support). Several orders of magnitude fewer customers also makes the management of their OS much easier.
I guess the point is, Windows, in my opinion, is one of the best things that ever happened to computing. It works on a truly staggering array of hardware, on tens or hundreds of millions of computers in all sorts of languages and configurations with a huge variety of skilled and unskilled users, and, for the most part, it just works. That is an astounding achievement that neither the Linux nor Apple camps can claim honestly, in my opinion.
Now, I am not an MS apologist; I think their innovation has stagnated and there are all sorts of ethical and judgment problems with their business decisions. But that doesn’t change the incredible accomplishments of the company and its software.
*steps off soapbox*
Oh, higher resolution cardinal pictures would be nice!