Doubting Thomas Blog

Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

I love that there are so many tech gadgets available now. When I was a kid, I was the 2nd person in my Area Code to buy his own Commodore VIC-20. (No, I have no way of proving I was the 2nd…. But I do know that I wasn’t the first, because my friend Craig bought his first.) I never would have dreamed that things like the iPad would ever be created, much less at a price that we commoners could afford.

I am not shopping for cool tech gadgets myself, but I like to know about them. So, I look at their specs, their features, prices, and I even read background articles about how the designs were developed, how they affect (or are affected by) other tech gadgets that are available, etc. With all that info, it is easy to form an opinion, and it is easy to picture how I might use the gadget. But it is not any easier to choose one gadget out of the available set of gadgets.

If I had to actually make a decision and pick one of the new gadgets that has come out in the past month, I don’t know which I would choose. First of all, I don’t think I actually need anything. It’s all a matter of want, which I think most commoners would agree is also the case with them. What can’t we do without gadgets? I probably have more gadgets than I can fully utilize as it is, but please don’t ask me to be circumspect about my consumerism, I don’t know if I have enough headache pills to handle that.

One of my best friends bought a Kindle, and when he showed it to me, I was amazed. It is very good at what it does. And it does some things that aren’t necessarily advertised, which my friend was quick to show me. Cool. If I were a person who does a lot of reading (oh, I miss grad school), I would need a Kindle.

And then along came the iPad, which also lets you do a lot of reading, but it does a lot more than the Kindle, too. And a lot of the things that the iPad does are things that I like to do: look at photos, read web sites, listen to music, find stuff on a map, etc. Cool. If I were a person who didn’t already have a laptop computer, I would need an iPad.

But then I read in the tech news web sites that Google is going to try to get in on this game too. Google published some pictures of what a portable flat computer thingy might look like if it were running the Chrome web browser (which Google gives away for free). Google is also putting out operating systems for mobile phones and computers now, so the only cost involved in using their product is the hardware, which is mainly produced by other people.

You may know that I prefer Apple computers over Windows computers, but I do use Windows (I’m writing this blog entry on an old Windows XP desktop), and I use Linux a lot, too (specifically, ubuntu). My newest computer, a netbook I use for meeting with clients on-site, runs both Windows 7 and the netbook remix of Ubuntu, and I like both of those systems about the same. So, at least in terms of operating systems, I don’t have to choose one–I use whatever is handy at the moment, and whatever best suits the activity or project that I’m working on.

And that’s what guides my decision-making process for the mobile gadgets I started this post with. I have a mobile phone that is not a smart phone. Would I like a phone running Android? Sure, you bet. Would I like an iPhone? No doubt. But neither of those mobile gadgets is better suited to accomplish what my current phone does for me. And while they are cool, I won’t be buying a Kindle, an iPad, or a Chrome-something, because, as far as the developers have brought them so far, they don’t suit me any better than the gadgets I already have.

At my day job, I occasionally come across things that I want to remember to do at home, but by the time I get home, I forget…does that ever happen to you?

So today, I’m marking a couple To Do list items down on this blog, so that, when I get home, I’ll remember the web addresses of the programs I want to try out at home.

1. The first is a free application for syncing the files between computers.
   • Dropbox

I use use three computers at home (an Apple notebook, a Linux desktop, and a Windows desktop), and there are times when I have to stop and think, on which computer is the file I need? (Okay, I admit that often, when I think of such questions, I don’t use proper grammar, so what I really think at those moments when I need a certain file is more like “where’s that file at?”)

And the beauty part is that it works with Linux, Windows, and Mac computers! It’s perfect for my needs.

2. This next program I came across is going to help me get rid of a different free application that I haven’t been able to uninstall from my Mac. It was only free for a trial period, and it wasn’t that great, so I didn’t purchase the program when the trial period ended.
   • Apptrap

   Even though I dragged that application into the trash on my notebook, the program still gives me pop-ups when I start Firefox. It’s annoying, but as far as I know, it doesn’t cause any problems with my system or with Firefox’ I just have to click Quit every time.

Let me know, if you have tried either of these programs, how they have worked for you. Or, if you use other programs to accomplish the same thing, let me know what they are, and how well they work. FREE is preferred, but if you know of a low-cost file-syncing program that works on Mac, Windows, and Linux, let me know, in case Dropbox doesn’t work.

Last week, the Code Weavers company made good on its promise to give away licenses to use its Cross-Over program, which lets users run software applications designed for one operating system on some other operating system.

Code Weavers promised that if gas prices came down below $3/gallon during President Bush’s term, they’d give away licenses that normally cost $40 each.

I got a license so that I can run Windows programs on my Mac, and today I finally got around to installing it.

Right of the bat, it offers to install a bunch of programs that are in its list of “supported” programs, and those are most of the popular programs people use, such as all the Microsoft Office programs, and a bunch of other stuff. (Note: Microsoft Office for Mac is fully compatible with all the files created or opened by Microsoft Office on a Windows computer, so it is probably redundant to have both.)

I didn’t install any of the supported applications, because I generally have what I need on my Mac already, such as Office for Mac, for example. I used Cross-Over to install a Windows-only program that I bought a while ago, a photo/clip-art program that came with thousands of royalty-free stock photos.

So far, so good, and I’m glad I upgraded my Mac’s RAM to 2 GB, because Cross-Over uses the WINE emulation code-base to act like Windows, but it is running on top of the Mac OS, so it is a little like running to OS’s at the same time. I don’t think my Mac would be very happy doing that much work on the 1GB of RAM I had when I bought it.

The first thing I did after browsing through the photos on the CD was start exporting them as GIF’s into a folder on my Mac’s hard drive, so that I won’t have to run this program every time I want to select a stock photo for the projects I’m doing.

Here’s one of the photos from this collection:

Okay, I have to admit, I tend to blog most about computer geek stuff these days, but hey, it’s what I do. A lot. (Remember when I used to photo blog every day? Remember the good old days when I blogged all my bike rides? Oh, where has the time gone?)

Anyway, I’ve been reading so much about this particular news story that I’m just plain surprised no one else (at least not that I’ve read yet) has written about this one (seemingly major) point, so here goes.

Did you see the news articles about a company that is selling computers that run the Apple Mac operating system? If you’ve managed to miss all these articles, here’s a quick news.google.com search for “psystar”. As of this moment, Google’s news aggregator found 257 articles with the word “psystar” in them.

Psystar is selling computers that run Mac OS X. The big deal is that the Apple company has, since about 1997 anyway, said that their operating system is not allowed to be run on any other hardware besides their own. Not allowed–scary terms, aren’t they?

Apple’s end-user license agreement (their EULA, which no one I know has ever actually read) says “This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.” When you purchase a license for the Mac OS, the EULA is basically a contract that restricts what you do with the operating system.

Some people have interpreted the legal strength of any EULA (not just Apple’s) to be only as strong as the software publisher’s ability to enforce it. In other words, if you can’t make me stop violating your EULA, I don’t have to stop violating your EULA. So if I get a copy of a program from my friend at work, install it on my own computer in violation of the EULA, so what? Maybe, for example, a music program’s EULA limits HOW you use the program to certain NON-professional activities, such as playing music for your personal enjoyment or the entertainment of your family at home, if they can’t make you stop playing music for pay as a D.J., then that’s the music-software publisher’s problem. Right?

Okay, I don’t want to go all righteous on you, but I wanted to put an analogy out there for your consideration. It’s not just the Mac OS EULA that is getting violated, but that’s the main point of all the articles I’ve read about PsyStar so far.

The most common sentiment I’ve seen so far is that, somehow, for brazenly violating the Mac OS EULA, PsyStar is a brave contender in an otherwise scared-of-Apple-lawyers battlefield.

To me, this is more like the theft of intellectual property of downloading illegal copies of movies. And it also seems to me that this is exactly like the theft of intellectual property that thousands of people have committed against Microsoft when they “borrow” their friend’s Microsoft Office install disk or use their friend’s XP license to upgrade from Win2K. That kind of theft is exactly why Vista, Microsoft’s latest operating system, has better authentication methods built into it. Microsoft wants everyone to pay for Vista. (Hey, maybe THAT’S why Vista hasn’t been as popular as XP was when XP was still kind of new. Or maybe XP is so good that people don’t feel the need to upgrade to Vista.)

Prior to Apple’s move to the Intel chip, it was pretty hard to run the Mac OS on any hardware other than Apple’s design, so very few people bothered, and frankly the kind of people interested in running the Mac OS are the kind of people who are not just willing, but actually excited about paying more for Apple’s hardware than that hardware, sans Mac OS, might be worth in the open market. (Go ahead and Google it though, you’ll find some hard-core geeks have found ways to run earlier versions of the Mac OS on various non-Apple machines.)

So, because it has only recently been EASY (easy being a relative term) to run OS X on non-Apple hardware, PsyStar gets a lot of press for selling computers with OS X already installed. Up until now, if you wanted to run OS X on other hardware, you pretty much had to figure out how to do it yourself, and if you were lucky you found some advice, directions, maybe even a driver or two if you were lucky, online.

Think about it. If one has to do all kinds of geeky research and download weird files and do strange things to one’s NON-APPLE computer hardware to get OS X to run on it, is it more or less likely that one is going to FIRST go to the Apple store and buy a license for it?

I suggest that it is perfectly unlikely. So now Apple is out the cash they would have received from the sale of that license. Does Apple need the money?

Does Microsoft need to sell every single copy of Vista in order to stay in business? Does the band U2 really need my $12 for their latest CD, or can’t I just burn a copy from my friend?

To me, the main thrust of all the news stories I’ve seen about PsyStar SO FAR is that everyone is kind of impressed (even if they couch their enthusiasm in polite, legally defensible techno-speak), that PsyStar is doing its thing. Maybe more people will do the same. Maybe the big corporations are finally going to get their comeuppance from the common folk. Yay, Common Folk! HURRAY FOR EULA VIOLATORS EVERYWHERE!

Maybe it will finally be AFFORDABLE for people to get great operating systems and have the freedom of choice for any kind of hardware they like, whatever is available on the market. Can you live with Linux? Can you remember that CUPS stands for “common unix printer services”? That’s what it will be, folks, if you don’t start paying for your operating systems.

What is the world coming to, a total abandonment of all things refined? Do we really want to have to deal with the kludgy, socially awkward geeks who install Linux, or can’t we hold onto the shiny goodness that is the Apple store?

I, for one, like, no LOVE, that I get to spend my work day and my free time clicking away on my shiny, (mostly) perfect MacBook Pro; my funky, retro G4 iMac; and my shiny, gorgeous, hard-working iMac Intel Core 2 Duo. I demand that you all to go to the Apple store and fork over whatever it takes to have one in your home and your office too. Heck, get one for your car while you’re at it.

The alternative is unthinkable. Unbearable. If Apple goes out of business, I’ll blame you personally.

People always tell me that one of the reasons they don’t buy an Apple computer is that it is so much more expensive than a Windows computer.

But take a look at this old Mac that’s been functioning as a web server for many years: