Does it really matter which browser you use? So many of us spend our lives in a browser that it is reasonable to think the answer is yes. Nevertheless, all browsers pretty much do the same thing. Once familiarity sets in, you have to have a compelling reason to move from one browser to another.
In 2004, I ditched the world’s de-facto browser Internet Explorer for a weird upstart browser called Mozilla Firefox. It was an easy switch. It was true that back then, thanks to Microsoft’s proprietary extensions to HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that things would not always behave the same way in both browsers. Six years later, I still have to use Internet Explorer on a few sites, because the application has not been updated to use web standards. This is now largely a past memory. Unless you need some quirky feature like HTML 5 compatibility (which most browsers are racing to address anyhow) most of the rendering oddities are in the past. Not that a few don’t still bite us. Last I checked, Internet Explorer still did not allow rows in HTML tables to dynamically collapse through Javascript.
For six years, I have been satisfied with Firefox, and generally happier with each new release. I loved all the free plug-ins that were available. The latest version of Firefox (3.6) that I recently downloaded introduced personas. These are sort of like themes for the blank spaces around the edge of your browser. It’s pretty neat to look at, but it’s really window dressing, just like the wallpaper on your computer’s desktop. What matters the most to me is usability. Simple tends to be better.
Firefox’s weakness the last year or so has been its instability. It crashes a lot for me on both Windows and the Mac. This could be more annoying than it is, for you can at least restart it quickly and it will remember your open windows. Firefox also suffers from new version syndrome. Once every few weeks it wants to install a new minor version of itself, sometimes with new features, but mostly to fix bugs. As annoying as new versions are, it’s a straightforward and quick process. It’s better than Internet Explorer, which even though it claims to have excellent security is rife with bugs that require all sorts of mostly behind the scenes patching. IE wants to keep you in the dark about its bugs. Firefox is in your face with them by patching them so quickly.
Since I have a Mac, I also have Safari, which I use from time to time. It’s pretty nice, and there actually is a version of Safari for the PC, although it looks quite a bit different on a PC. There are lesser-known browsers out there like Opera (proprietary and not necessarily free) and Konquerer (for Linux boxes). Now there is also the official Google browser called Chrome. Chrome is part of Google’s grand design toward a web-centric architecture. Its operating system Chrome OS, which I wrote about recently, is taking wings and will soon be appearing on fine netbook computers.
I had installed the Chrome browser but had never really put it through its paces. I did so over the last long snow-congested weekend. After a couple hours, I was hooked. I will still need Firefox for quite a while. If Firefox can be made as fast and stable as Chrome, I would gladly drift back to Firefox. I must say though that Chrome’s speed and stability are both very compelling. I didn’t need Firefox to come out with a persona feature. What I need is a browser that is a lot like my Mac: I don’t have to think about it. It should just work. The best browser is like a sheet of glass. It renders the page of interest transparently, cleanly and correctly. Chrome just takes you where you need to go quickly and with (so far) none of the quirky rendering issues that plague most browsers. Through delivering high backwards and forwards compatibility, Chrome seems to have filled the niche. No wonder that Chrome’s browser share is climbing rapidly, mostly at IE and Firefox’s expense.
Clearly, it is not as feature rich as Firefox. The bountiful plug-ins that are available with Firefox for the most part do not exist with Chrome. However, some Chrome plug-ins do exist. My suspicion is that a good part of the Firefox plug-in community is already working on Chrome compatible plug-ins. As a web developer, I need the amazingly excellent plug-in called Firebug for Chrome. I sure hope it is being ported, although Chrome comes with some built in developer features that are quite decent.
The average user will just notice Chrome’s rendering speed, which tends toward blazingly quick. I had no idea so much of the slowness in Firefox was just its code trying to make everything look pretty. Of course, if the Internet is slow or congested, no browser will speed it up, but whatever Chrome is doing to render content quickly it is doing very well. It helps to have very deep pockets. Since a lot of our content comes from Google, Google can do a lot to put its content on the edge of the network so it will download quickly.
Simplicity and too much intimacy with your favorite browser have a downside. It would be nice, for example, if Chrome would refresh the page by pressing the F5 key, which I have used for the last 15 years. (Instead, it is Ctrl/Command-R.) It would also be nice if my bookmarks would appear on the side, as in Firefox, by pressing Ctrl/Command-B. I also like Firefox’s search box in the top right corner, although by integrating the URL field with search engines you arguably have a simpler interface. Perhaps those features will show up in time. Maybe it would be better if they did not. Simplicity also has a certain virtue. Most of us prefer cars that are simple to use. Too many gizmos and gadgets on the dashboard can make for a confusing experience
Here is hoping that the folks at Mozilla address the instability and page rendering issues so I can go back to it. I hate to give any monolithic company, even one as friendly as Google, all my loyalty. Still, Chrome is compelling in a way IE never was. If you try it for a couple days, you are likely to find yourself also hooked.
February 9th, 2010 at 07:02pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
2 comments
Tags: Browsers, Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS, Internet Explorer
You may not have noticed, but Google seems hell bent on a strategy that it hopes will ultimately kill Microsoft Windows. Many have tried but so far, none have succeeded in toppling the behemoth desktop operating system. Google’s ultimate success in toppling Windows will depend in part on its success convincing people to move their data from their desktop computers into “The Cloud”.
For those of you who are not terribly tech savvy, “The Cloud” refers to the Internet in general, but more specifically to the many data servers attached to the Internet that hold personal and other data for us. You may already have much of your personal data in the cloud and not know it. For example, if you use GMail (Google’s email service), your email is hosted by Google somewhere within its cloud-computing infrastructure. Chances are even Google would have a hard time telling you exactly where your email is stored. It is probably redundantly stored among its hosting centers. Redundant hosting helps ensure that your data is always available.
In fact, there are plenty of vendors outside of Google enamored with “The Cloud” and Microsoft is among them. For example, recently Microsoft announced a stripped down version of its Office Suite for The Cloud. You may not even have to pay to use it, providing you are okay with its limited features, advertising and trust that Microsoft will forever store your personal data. Microsoft is playing catch up. Google has offered Google Docs (its version of a web-ified MS Office) for years. It too is not as feature robust as the Office Suite, but it has certain nice to have features and in most instances is free. Because it exists in The Cloud, it also allows easy sharing of documents and spreadsheets among multiple parties.
If Microsoft’s killer product is Windows, Google’s killer product is not necessarily its search engine, but its ability to maintain a highly available and scalable Internet cloud. These things do not just happen. They require many years of work, research and refinement. The reason cloud computing took off slowly is that building such an infrastructure is hard. Google did it first but there have been other leaders in this field, including Amazon. Amazon, in addition to its ability to sell you pretty much anything online, has been a cloud computing innovator too. It takes a different tack by offering businesses very cheap computing resources on demand.
It takes a while for cloud computing to work up a head of steam, but Google is getting there. For example, the City of Los Angeles will be letting Google host its email services using a commercial version of its GMail service. Whether this will be a stake in the heart of Microsoft Exchange remains to be seen. Exchange is Microsoft’s pricy but widely used business-class email server. It is a complex beast requiring many skilled specialists to keep it going. With email seen as a commodity, cloud services like GMail seem a logical way for a business to save a lot of money.
Even the Department of Interior, where I work, is rethinking email. It is seriously looking at cloud computing as a replacement for its mixture of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes email servers. Its goal is to complete a department-wide transition by the end of 2010, which seems ambitious to me. It is possible that a year from now when I am sending work related email it will be through a hosted service like GMail rather than Lotus Notes.
It’s a little known fact, but far more email is transmitted across the Internet than web pages. (This may be due to ninety percent of email traffic being spam.) Consequently, a company that can grab a majority of the email market is well positioned to drive the future of the Internet. GMail and Google’s ubiquitous search engine are two feet into the enterprise space that may eventually kill Windows. The next part of Google’s strategy is to control the desktop. What Google is hoping to do is make desktop computing obsolete. If you store all your personal stuff in The Cloud and it is always highly available then what is the point of a big, bloated operating system like Windows, particularly when Windows can take many minutes just to boot up and costs a lot of money to set up and maintain?
To help sell this vision, Google has released its own web browser called Chrome. It’s big selling point is speed. It reputedly renders pages ten times faster than Internet Explorer and is even faster than Firefox, my browser of choice. Its market share is currently quite tiny, and is likely to remain such for the near future. For many people with high-speed Internet connections, faster rendering of web content is very much appreciated. While I like Firefox, it can be slow at times, particularly when you press the back button. If Chrome can do away with such annoyances, I might have a compelling reason to switch browsers.
Google’s strategy for killing Microsoft has two parts: selling people on netbooks and its promised new operating system called Chrome OS. If you are unfamiliar with the term netbook, it is small (generally portable) computer optimized for interacting with the Internet. It deemphasizes storing documents on the netbook. Instead, data is stored in “The Cloud” where presumably it lives longer than you do. To succeed, Google needs to convince you to trust it to not only always retain your data, but to keep it secure and highly available at all times. While Google suffers from widely scattered service problems such as a recent GMail outage, overall its track record is very good and getting better. The Facebook generation seems to be comfortable keeping its data in the cloud. Chrome OS then becomes little more than a very lightweight operating system for Netbooks. It would boot up very quickly, unlike Microsoft Windows. Presumably, Chrome would be the browser of choice for its speed and a virtual desktop operating system as well as an integrated web browser. The netbook becomes really nothing more than a portal for allowing you to interact with all your data in the cloud as well as surf the web. In some sense, it is a Back to the Future operating system, where netbooks essentially become fancy terminals.
If Google can convince us that desktop computing in the 21st century is for Luddites, then the handwriting in on the wall for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft can try to offer its own netbooks and cloud-computing infrastructure, but it is clearly years behind Google. Nor can it offer a compelling reason for us to stick with the Windows brand in a network-computing world. Why pay for an operating system and software when Google Chrome OS would be (presumably) free, as well as most if not all of its hosted applications? Making Chrome OS available would also encourage software vendors to create their own applications that run under Chrome OS. The result could be an application-centric Internet realized through quick and response web-based applications using Chrome OS.
To the extent you believe in Google’s vision, you may wish to start selling your Microsoft stock for Google stock.
November 22nd, 2009 at 02:46pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
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Tags: Google, Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS, Windows
The Huffington Post must be getting uppity, or clever, or both. This online newspaper/mega-blog/news aggregator (it is hard to say exactly what Huffpost is) reached a couple significant milestones in September. Specifically, it overtook the online versions of stalwart newspaper web sites like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. Or so analytics.com reports, which tracks visits on many prominent web sites.
Neither The Washington Post nor the L.A. Times are going out of business any time soon, and they clearly also make revenue from their newspapers. However, the upstart Huffington Post is slapping them around. Amazingly, Huffpost cataloged more unique visitors than either of these sites in September, while also linking to interesting content on their web sites. Here are the statistics for September 2009:
- Huffington Post – 8,350,417 unique visitors
- Washington Post – 8,124,820 unique visitors
- LA Times – 8,319,427 unique visitors
I find these statistics amazing. Neither The Washington Post nor The L.A. Times is some obscure newspaper. The Washington Post is the paper of reference for Washington D.C. and by extension the federal government. It can count among its accomplishments bringing down a U.S. president. The L.A. Times commands a huge metropolitan area and has had no local competition since 1989. Yet, The Huffington Post, which has been online less than five years, now receives more visitors than either of these sites and likely generates more online revenue as well. By contrast, washingtonpost.com first went online in 1996.
So this is just more bad news for the newspaper industry: a spunky online startup is doing a better job of communicating news and opinions online than they are. Most likely, Huffpost is doing this with fewer people and at less cost. At least the Grey Lady herself is not yet threatened in cyberspace. The New York Times web site recorded 19,546,618 unique visitors during the same period. One sign that the New York Times is sweating is that they recently announced layoffs of an additional one hundred positions in its newsroom. This may not be a great strategy in the end, given that The Huffington Post is hiring while both The New York Times and The Washington Post are firing.
Newspapers like The L.A. Times and The Washington Post do like to complain about sites like Huffpost. Mainly they feel like they should get a referral fee for their shoe leather journalism. I feel their concern is without merit. Unless a web site has an agreement with a newspaper, they link directly to the article, rather than embed its content on their web site. Moreover, Huffpost only adds or quotes a sentence or two from the actual article, which is legal. Newspapers that do not want their content accessible by sites like Huffpost merely need insert one line of text into their site’s .htaccess file to block them. Clearly, newspapers are talking out both sides of their mouths. They know they are getting more revenue due to referral from sites like Huffpost than they would if their content was not searchable. If they are curious, then as an experiment, they could block these sites and see if their bottom line improves. Only a fool would take this bet. The New York Times actually tried it by hiding its “premier” content (like columnist Paul Krugman) behind a paid firewall, and found they made more money by serving the content for free with ads.
Nor does Huffpost survive solely by pointing users to other sites. Granted, it remains a fair amount of their business model, but the Huffpost also has a large number of prominent bloggers and something that is starting to resemble a news staff. Moreover, newspapers like The Washington Post are engaging in pennywise but pound-foolish strategies. A few months back The Washington Post let go their most prominent blogger Dan Froomkin, who apparently drew considerable traffic to their site. Two weeks after being fired, Froomkin was hired by Huffpost and is now chief of their Washington bureau as well as a part-time blogger.
What is Huffpost doing that the other newspapers are not? Many things. Newspapers, with a few exceptions like USA Today (15,487,750 visitors) are regional in nature. Huffpost is essentially national, although it is taking steps to provide localized editions (New York, Chicago and Denver so far). Second, it feels like a conglomeration of various types of newspapers. By combining the sober with the sensational, it is sort of like getting a New York Times and a New York Post in one online experience. Huffpost’s left column is essentially the “blogger/opinion” section of its “paper”, and is sort of, but not quite as good as opinion sections of The Washington Post and The New York Times. Its sober side tends to appear in the middle column, although its headline screams Drudge Report style. The right hand column is largely entertainment news.
Huffpost also watches demographic trends and is aggressively playing to them, as is evident with its liberal bent. Like it or not in 21st century America we are likely to see governments and social policies that are more liberal than today’s. It is trying hard to appeal to Generations X and Y, while keeping enough solid content to interest baby boomers like me. Most recently, it opened up an impact section, where readers can contribute stories about people dealing with major life crises. It is smart not only because it showcases those who have fallen through the cracks in our society, but also because it tends to a ready and underserved market of people interested in these stories.
If newspapers like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times eventually fail, one has to wonder if Huffpost’s business model will fail as well, given how much of their business depends on newsgathering done elsewhere. It appears though that Arianna has a plan and is investing today’s profits to create staff and stringer-written national and local content.
In short, as I speculated recently, Huffpost may well replace traditional newspapers. It is smartly positioning itself to be the first mass-online newspaper. Even the venerable Grey Lady should quake. Tomorrow’s electronic newspapers will look superficially like today’s, but will be broader in scope and allow greater personalization. They will provide both general interest news as well as stories of interest to more specialized and local communities. Newspapers still clinging to old models are likely to end up outfoxed and out of business.
October 21st, 2009 at 07:00pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Huffington Post, Media, Newspapers
Two years ago, I wrote about what I saw as the hidden power of Google Docs. Google Docs offers word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software on the web, similar to Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In the last two years, Google Docs have not displaced the Microsoft Office suite, but its functionality has improved. Some businesses are actually paying Google to use Google Docs, noting that even though its license costs money, it is cheaper than Microsoft Office. Google Docs remains free for personal use, unlike the pricey Microsoft Office suite. Free is nice, particularly if you are wondering why you have to shell out hundreds of bucks per computer to run Microsoft Office. You also don’t need to worry about losing a Google Docs file, as it is stored in the massive Google “cloud” somewhere. You also do not have to worry about installing, upgrading or patching it either.
In truth, most of us use no more than twenty percent of the Microsoft Office suite anyhow, so it is unlikely that we would ever notice any missing functionality if we switched to Google Docs. We stay with Microsoft Office primarily because we are comfortable with it. Microsoft Office is arguably faster, since documents do not have to traverse the worldwide web in order to be stored.
The folks in Google’s labs have been busy creating and improving innovative products like Google Docs, Google Earth, Google Maps, Gmail and Google Analytics. I have recently been experimenting with yet another product Google has been fostering called Google Visualizations. Once again, I really like what I am seeing. I think this product has enormous potential. Unfortunately, at least the moment still requires a web developer in order to create useful visualizations.
Google Visualizations is about more easily creating web pages with useful and interactive data driven graphics. The premise behind it is that static graphics on a web page are so yesterday. Most graphs and charts rendered on the web are images. The images are generally created on the web server and embedded in a web page. Largely, you cannot interact with these graphics. To the extent that graphs and charts are animated on the web, it is because they are written using Adobe Flash technology, which is built into browsers. Although end users do not pay for the privilege of seeing fancy animated graphics (and animations), those who create these graphics arguably pay hefty fees to Adobe to license the technology.
To be clear, Google Visualizations is not an Adobe Flash (or for that matter Microsoft Silverlight) killer. These products have other uses besides rendering data in fancy formats. What Google Visualizations provides is a programmer friendlier and less proprietary way to display and manipulate analytic information on the web in ways that are more visually appealing and more interactive.
To get a sense of what can be done with Google Visualizations, spend a couple of minutes here. I think that you will agree that Google has come up with some clever ways of rendering data. While Google created the visualization platform, it has also levered communities of open source developers on the Internet who, true to form, are developing innovative visualizations that may surprise and amaze you.
Google Visualizations are helping us better see and easily interpret data hosted on the web. Data sources are voluminous on the web, but they are only useful to the extent that we humans can interpret, understand and draw inferences from the data. Some web sites have tried to be data friendly by allowing us to download their data as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Assuming we have fluency in Microsoft Excel we could then slice and dice the data gathered over the web, but only after significant pruning of the data to just that subset we are interested in. It is not very efficient.
A good example of a useful Google Visualization is its Gauge Visualization. The Gauge Visualization succeeds because we understand it at a glance. For example, if you are responsible for monitoring a network, a customized console application that reads information from various data sources and places all the information in one place where it is easy to see where the trouble spots are is very useful. Even with the coding required to make these Visualizations work, it is a relatively fast way of being able to render data, once you are used to using the Visualization API.
Google Visualizations harness the power of the non-proprietary Javascript engine in your browser to render very pretty graphics on the fly. It does this by providing its own Javascript libraries. A programmer still has to write the Javascript that renders the particular visualizations needed. Yet most Javascript programmers will find the interface straightforward. Google hides much of its complexity from the programmer.
The true innovation in Google Visualizations is not the code that renders the pretty visualizations, but figuring out a generic way to render rich tabular data using one format. Tabular data is nothing more than data expressed in columns and rows, like a spreadsheet. Put data in columns and rows in a smart way and it can be rendered in an infinite number of ways, from conventional HTML tables, to bar and pie charts and even to advanced charts like heat charts, and you have something very compelling. If data content providers can provide data in a Google Visualization data query format, the data can potentially be rendered, analyzed and interpreted in infinite numbers of ways.
Not coincidentally, when needed Google Visualizations ties closely to Google Docs. If you take the time to express your data in the spreadsheet in Google Docs, you can render it in all sorts of creative ways as a Google Visualization. Since no special software is needed to view the visualizations, and since a well-supported code base is rapidly developing behind the product, I believe you can expect a lot more general use of Google Visualizations in the months and years ahead. Your bank, for example, may provide bank balance charts by day for your accounts, which are rendered using Google Visualizations. Your stockbroker might provide graphs that let you look at your investments in detail with a few clicks of a mouse.
It is my hope that the government will provide its data in Google Visualization accessible formats. Unfortunately, right now government licensing of the Google Visualization API is murky, but it is actually something I am helping to rectify where I work. For example, if the Census Bureau provided census data services in a Google Visualization data table format, its data will be far more accessible and, just as importantly, usable.
In time, I suspect that the Javascript skills currently needed to render Google Visualizations will become less onerous, or perhaps go away altogether. If this happens you will be able to create and share Google Visualizations without being a programmer. Google is a smart company. I would be very surprised if they were not already working on a programmer-less interface to Google Visualizations.
I expect great things in the next decade with this technology. Time will tell if I am correct.
September 4th, 2009 at 06:58pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
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Tags: Google, Google Visualizations
Since I put my first domain on the web around 2000 I have been in a quixotic-like search for a good web host. In case you are unfamiliar with the term, a web host serves web content, like the content on this site. To say the least, I have been frequently dissatisfied, in part because I have more sophisticated needs. Without some research, I cannot tell you how many web hosts I have used in these last nine years.
They all fell flat eventually. Moving my many domains from one web host to another was an annual (sometimes more than an annual) exercise. That is why it is such a pleasure to say that I have found a good and reliable web host at last. I just renewed my annual contract with my current web host, Media Temple, not with reluctance but with something bordering on enthusiasm. I had not even waited to get a billing reminder. To make sure nothing slipped through the cracks I took the initiative and renewed before the end of my contract in early August.
Is Media Temple the perfect web host? It is by no means because the perfect web host really depends on your needs. It is not for everyone because most people who need web hosting are not particularly web savvy nor are they particularly fussy. These people go to hosts like GoDaddy, in many cases because they do not know where else to go. I run a small part time business where I install web software for people, so I have worked on lots of hosts. GoDaddy is optimized for small sites like a Cub Scout Troop where page hits are low and customers are not too fussy if service is sporadically unavailable or inconsistent. In most cases, these customers do not notice issues because they do not get enough traffic for anyone to notice. In many cases, they do not know the right question to ask anyhow to resolve their particular issue so they stay silent and hope it goes away.
Media Temple like all web hosts has a help desk. However, you are expected not to be a web moron. You are expected to know what things like DNS and SSH are. You are expected to use their knowledge base to see if the answer to your question already exists. You are expected to take the time to make sure your sites are backed up and you are not exceeding your quota. Your primary interface for doing these things is the integrated Plesk control panel. Using Plesk is straightforward but at times a bit mysterious. I am quite web savvy, but even I was surprised by how deeply nested Plesk can be at times. For example, I wanted to use phpMyAdmin, a typical tool provided by a web host for administering MySQL databases. It is installed but you have to dig for it. Moreover, you have to turn off popup blocking for your site so it will come up.
Plesk allow you to do pretty much everything you need to do to manage a web site. You can create databases, backup your files, schedule cron jobs, set up users and mailboxes and enable features like SSH. Only occasionally have I had to get my hands dirty, so to speak. Since everyone is virtually hosted, I once had to change PHP to handle attachments of more than the default two megabytes, which meant going in as “root” and editing a php.conf file. I find certain things much faster to do the old fashioned way, using SSH and the Unix command line. Deleting a directory with all its folders is so much faster in Unix with a rm –r –f folder command.
Once everything is set up though, things run sweet and most importantly, reliably. Mainly, you do not have to worry about the sorts of problems that used to drive me nuts, like consuming too many server resources, or sporadic periods where page response is slow, or sudden inconsistent behavior.
I have had a few issues, some of them caused by my own ignorance. I ran out of disk space once because I stupidly hadn’t told the backup software to not let backups exceed a certain amount of disk quota. I have hit kernel and burstable memory limits a couple times, resulting in the domain not being available. When I have noticed quirks, I reboot my virtual server in the Plesk control panel and problems tend to disappear. Two system-related problems where I needed technical support in twelve months is a vast improvement over previous web hosts where issues were often out of my control and the help desk surly or not available.
I currently host six domains (including this blog) using one account with minimal issues regarding any of my domains. I am using their Dedicated-Virtual service, paying about $42 a month (a discounted price with a one year contract). If your needs are more modest, you may find their Grid Service ($20 a month) more than adequate. If your needs grow, Media Temple offers a convenient upgrade service. No web host can promise unlimited server resources for $50, $20 or $4.99 a month.
Paying more for a web host does not necessarily mean better service. If you are getting great hosting for a $4.99 a month special, enjoy it while you can because a company cannot be profitable selling hosting at $4.99 a month unless they cram a ton of rarely accessed web sites on the same server. $20, $40 or $100 a month will not necessarily buy you great web hosting either. It really depends on how much traffic your site gets. Mainly it depends on whether your host has the right mixture of people and technologies to juggle the complexity of web hosting. It also depends on management making a conscious effort not to oversell their servers to keep their profits up.
Media Temple is the first web host I have found that has demonstrated it has the right stuff. As such, providing they can maintain this high level of quality, they will have a long time customer.
July 26th, 2009 at 01:33pm
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Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Web Hosting
Forty years ago, I was a twelve-year-old boy whose voice had yet to change living in Endwell, New York. Like most Americans I was glued to my TV set because what appeared to be the most monumental event in the history of mankind was underway: man was about to land and walk on the moon! 1969 was a crazy time. It made no sense that such an epic achievement was taking place amongst the chaos of The Vietnam War (which was going badly), assassinations and great civil unrest. Fortunately, absconded in our upstate New York suburb we were largely insulated from these events. We could however gaze into the night sky, look at the moon and marvel that our species was about to land and put a foot on the lunar surface.
On July 20th, 1969, the day astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, the network coverage was nonstop. All the networks had continuous coverage but like most Americans we were tuned into our CBS affiliate. Why? Because the moon landing was being covered by trusted news anchor and space nut Walter Cronkite. Between many commercials from The International Paper Company (“where good ideas grow on trees”), Uncle Walt and his space buddies (which typically included astronaut Wally Schirra and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke) gave us the inside scoop. They were amply assisted by the CBS animation department, which created animations of events that we could not see live, like the landing of Eagle on the moon. (As I recall the simulated landing happened at least thirty seconds before the actual landing.) Americans may have been culturally divided but on July 20th, 1969 we were all watching TV or listening to the radio. It was not just America; it was the entire world. This triumphant event was simply not to be missed.
Yesterday, veteran CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite finally passed into the great hereafter at the ripe old age of 92. Wally Schirra died in 2007 at the age of 84. Arthur C. Clarke is still among the living at age 90. America’s space program, which reached its zenith on July 20th, 1969 is now nearing its nadir. The space shuttle is about to be retired. A next generation vehicle to take Americans into space is years away, at best. This means that soon for the first time since the 1960s the United States will have no way to put a man into space.
In many ways, July 20th, 1969 will probably be seen as the United States of America’s greatest moment. Since then America has felt like an empire in decline. In 1969, the universe seemed within our grasp. If we could put a man on the moon, we said, why not a man on Mars? Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, in a recent Washington Post op-ed, called for putting men on Mars by 2031. In reality, we could put a man on Mars by 2020 if we summoned our collective will. It would actually not be that large an engineering enterprise, at least compared with putting a man on the moon. In ten years, we went from Alan Shepard’s suborbital spaceflight in a Mercury capsule to putting a man on the moon. During the 1960s, we discovered that as a nation we could focus on what seemed like this crazy national goal and within a decade actually achieve it. In 2009, we struggle to even summon the will to limit our nation’s greenhouse gases.
What the hell happened? Part of the problem was that after the moon landing there seemed to be no satisfactory encore. Subsequent landings seemed anticlimactic, even though the later landings were far more interesting. By December 19, 1972 with the end of the Apollo 17 mission, our interest in exploring the moon largely ended. NASA tried to reinvent itself as a more practical agency. It reused surplus Apollo hardware and sent Skylab into earth orbit. The Skylab launch was the last time a Saturn V would rocket into space and I was five miles away to witness it. NASA then created the space shuttle as a next generation reusable space vehicle. Unfortunately, the space shuttle proved to be a great idea in theory, but not so much in practice. It was complex, hard to maintain and magnitudes more expensive than anticipated. At one point NASA was saying they could get cargo into orbit on the shuttle for $200 a pound. Each shuttle flight now costs in the magnitude of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Today, marginal crowds of tourists will show up for a shuttle launch. By becoming commonplace, shuttle launches have lost their fascination. In fact, our manned space program today is a product of 1970s engineering. The people who inspired us to marvel in the space program, like Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra, are largely dead or retired. With so many pressing needs and our government vastly overextended, there appears to be little will to reinvigorate our manned spaceflight program.
Our modern triumphs in the manned spaceflight program these days are somewhat muted and amount to the International Space Station, now actually close to completion. This is just as well because the space shuttle is the only vehicle big enough to ferry its largest components. The ISS too is largely being taken for granted. Its research is of marginal value. It is most useful simply as an exercise in learning what is required for people to live in space for long periods. It turns out that piecing together an international space station in orbit is hard work. It is also challenging to keep it in orbit. Rocket and satellite debris careens around in near earth orbit. The ISS needs occasional boosts so it doesn’t fall back into earth. What is its future? You would think that after investing about a hundred billion dollars we might want to keep it orbiting, but NASA has plans to de-orbit the ISS in 2016. Apparently, it cannot find the money to maintain it beyond then, so it might as well fall back to earth. With the shuttle’s retirement, we have to depend on Russian space capsules to service the ISS anyway.
The truth is the nation’s manned spaceflight program is on critical support. It is not clear that there is the political will to ensure that the United States maintains a manned spaceflight program at all. We have had great and sometimes stunning success with unmanned spacecraft exploring the solar system and beyond. Unless the dynamics change quickly though, the future of manned spaceflight may belong to the Russians and the Chinese.
We simply have lost interest. But perhaps, if enough Americans take the time to appreciate the 40th anniversary of the first landing on the moon, we will summon our collective will toward more manned space exploration of our universe.
July 18th, 2009 at 10:22am
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
one comment
Tags: Space Program, Walter Cronkite
I am still trying to figure out this Twitter thing. Its success is counterintuitive. I can see why it is interesting to follow a conversation, but its 140-character limitation (made necessary by the maximum of 160 characters allowed in cell phone text messages) would seem a fatal liability. Granted, it is nice to be able to push an instant message to the most lame and technology impaired devices, i.e. non-internet accessible cell phones. In time, the text message barrier will be overcome. All cell phones, even the cheap ones, will be Internet accessible. 160-character text messages will become as obsolete as Morse code.
In fact, if you want to follow someone or a conversation, doing it via a cell phone text message is inefficient, even when limited to 140 characters. Most cell phone networks charge per text message. Tweets are nothing if not voluminous. Moreover, tweets are not exactly instant. The closest we have to real real-time electronic conversation is instant messaging. Otherwise you have to wait until your Twitter client decides to poll for new tweets or Twitter can push the tweet to your cell phone. For most of us, if we really want to follow someone in real-time we had best be Internet accessible, and using a desktop application like Tweetdeck.
Granted it is neat to watch comments on trending topics on Twitter, although like anything else the vast majority of these tweets are about as interesting as a chat room conversation. When following a hot topic like the Iranian elections you might learn something in a Twitter topic that you will not find any other way. Yet Twitter, like any other social medium, is on the cusp of being abused. I had a “lady” follow me the other day (I have a number of Twitter accounts) who is your run of the mill sex scammer. If I follow her because she follows me, I am an unwitting accomplice in her spam network. Like the voluminous spam on Craigslist, without rigorous controls that I doubt Twitter can fully put in place, Twitter is likely to turn into 98% spam in no time flat.
While I try to figure out what Twitter means by reading erudite articles like this one, I watch the other Twitterer in my house, in this case my wife, to find out what she is doing with Twitter. Aside from following her host of online friends, she is also following celebrities. Fortunately, her taste in celebrities is rather specialized, people like Eddie Izzard and this guy. So I thought I would follow a celebrity to see what all the fuss is about. I decided to follow Jewel Staite.
Most likely, you are saying, “Who the heck is Jewel Staite?” That’s a good question because she is hardly a well known star, and at best she is a minor movie star. She is more of a television actress than a movie actress, most recently known for her character Dr. Jennifer Keller in Stargate: Atlantis and as Kaylee Frye in the short-lived Fox TV series Firefly where I fell in lust with her. Jewel played the ship’s grease monkey, but she had all the attributes I was looking for in a lust object: cute, apple cheeked, young, attractive, sweet, but with a smoldering sensuality. Although Canadian, she seemed more American than apple pie, the perfect sort of girl to have next door, fall in love with and live with happily ever after.
Kaylee is of course a character, but what of the actual woman Jewel Staite? What would I glean from following Jewel? She may be a minor celebrity but as of this morning, she has 13,927 followers whereas I have eleven people following me. Is Jewel anything like Kaylee, or Dr. Keller? It is hard to say for sure. With 13,927 followers Ms. Staite clearly doesn’t need any stalkers, so what she does reveal about herself is necessarily pretty superficial. Good for her. Some politicians could learn to be more discreet about what they post on Twitter.
Jewel is married which would be a disappointment if I were not twice her age and married myself. Having spent years hanging around Josh Whedon and the Stargate: Atlantis crowd, unsurprisingly many of Jewel’s friends are fellow actors, directors and producers. It sounds like work in Vancouver has been drying up, so she is currently in Los Angeles. From her tweets, I learn intimate details like she currently has a head cold, but stopped by a Borders yesterday anyhow. She has a passion for food (which suggests that she has an excellent personal trainer) and can be found at somewhat obscure LA area restaurants. She is no vegetarian. She also likes the theater and recently saw Michael Winslow in concert. Dark colored toilet seats disturb her. Does she have a germ phobia? Is this too much information?
Watching Jewel through the filter of Twitter is like watching someone through a pane of translucent glass. You sort of know what’s going on but mostly you do not, seeing shadows and hearing muffled voices but missing context. Still, it is clear to me that Jewel and I live in largely different universes. If real life put us together, I am not sure we could hold a conversation that lasted more than a couple of minutes. She likes good tacos, and I know of a few places locally, so we could perhaps do a light lunch or something. Or perhaps she could stop by to see me on her way to Paris. She recently intimated she had booked a hotel room in Paris.
If the translucent glass between Jewel and I were somehow clear glass, perhaps there would be much more of interest to discover. More likely I would become disillusioned. I know intellectually that actresses put their pants on one leg at a time just like me, but somehow I hope there is more there than someone like me, an ordinary human being. From Jewel’s tweets, she appears to be ordinary too. I doubt she would find much of interest about me, but perhaps she is brainy enough to find my blog interesting. It is clear that aside from our age differences we are on vastly different paths through life. We inhabit the same planet, breathe the same air, speak the same language and have inherited many of the same customs but there is not much else from what I can tell from watching her through Twitter.
Which means there is probably not much point in following her, so at some point I will probably unfollow her. I hope in the years ahead she dazzles us with her fine acting ability. It is likely that whatever her age I will find her attractive. If I am to follow a celebrity, perhaps I need a woman closer to my age and whose intellect appears to be more aligned with mine. I hope Madonna tweets.
I do agree with her about dark toilet seats though.
June 14th, 2009 at 11:00am
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology, Technology, The Arts |
no comments
Tags: Celebrities, Jewel Staite, Twitter
I moved to the Washington D.C. area in 1978. Before I moved, I picked up a copy of The Washington Post from my local newsstand. I wanted a taste of the area that I would soon call home.
I found it fascinating. The newspaper in Daytona Beach (where I was living at the time) was unaffectionately known as The Mullet Wrapper, because about all it was good for was wrapping mullet. It has almost no news in it, and what “news” it had was dreadfully uninteresting. Even back then, you had to hunt for a movie review within its pages. As for culture and arts, there was no virtually no such thing in Daytona Beach. The Washington Post, on the other hand, was awash with news: national, international and local. It was hard to find a wire service article in the paper because they had staff deployed all over the world who were reporting it firsthand. The Post bulged with insightful information.
In 2009, The Washington Post bulges a lot less. Like most American newspapers, it’s declining and in its case it is particularly painful to watch. I still have it delivered daily. Retrieving the newspaper off my driveway first thing in the morning is reflexive. Most recently the Post’s business section was shrunk and subsumed inside the A section. The comics were shrunk too, from three pages to two, and were reduced further in size as well. The Metro section is looking thinner. The Sports section has trimmed coverage and reduced the number of stories and tables. In short, while it is not close to being The Mullet Wrapper, it becomes less valuable every day. Only on Sundays does the full glory of what The Washington Post used to be reappear.
The economics of the shrinking newspaper market give The Post little choice, although their actions are counterproductive. The more they shrink The Post, the less content it has and thus the less reason there is to buy the paper in the first place. The way things are going, one of these days I will be canceling my subscription too. They will have reduced the value of its information below what I am willing to pay. I sure don’t need to wrap any mullet.
Newspapers look like goners, but I am not so sure. The Washington Post has a good chance of surviving, and I expect certain other major papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal will as well, although they may evolve into electronic-only copies. I also expect many niche community newspapers will survive and possibly thrive. It is a lot less costly to deliver bits to a display screen than it is to physically print and distribute a newspaper, and electronic versions are doubtless far more carbon-friendly. I am dubious that any electronic version of a newspaper will provide quite the same experience as its physical manifestation. Newspapers can be browsed; they invite your curiosity. Electronic versions are far less so, simply because you are limited by screen size, resolution and portability.
Newspapers are all desperately searching for the right formula to survive in the information age. What form of electronic content would be good enough to make you want to spend a quarter or two a day (plus the advertising) to get it? Based on the websites I read none of them is quite there. My suspicion is that a completely new revenue model will evolve. The bad news for the newspapers is that they will probably will not control it.
What timely news might we pay money for? The closest on-line entity that resembles a newspaper to me is The Huffington Post. It is part opinion, part news (with a left-wing slant) and part entertainment/scandal sheet. Aside from its opinions, much of its content comes from elsewhere. Their layout has opinion (blogs) in the left column, news in the middle column and entertainment in the right column. It also has a big and somewhat garish headline (usually with an image) at the top of the page. In general, the most topical news is toward the top of the page. As you scroll down the news gets a little bit less interesting and less timely.
Huffpost though is missing a few things you really need to replicate the newspaper experience. First, it has no sports section. For many it is the only reason to buy a newspaper. What it is really missing though and what makes newspapers so valuable is timely local news. If a content provider like Huffpost could figure out a way to integrate sports, local reporting and reviews of the local arts scene, you might have something that is functionally equivalent to a newspaper.
Perhaps what is most valuable about Huffpost is its template. The right newspaper template for the web can serve as a substitute for any newspaper and Huffpost’s is real close. Once we agree on the best newspaper template, it might make perfect sense to let a company like Google provide the web hosting, but let various content providers fill up parts of the template. Let users decide the slant, if any, they want from their news. The Huffpost template would work just as well for The Drudge Report (which IMHO is a seriously ugly and garish site). Say you want your center column to have news from The Drudge Report. Matt Drudge could provide the content (and the advertising) for that portion of the site. Say you like your sports from ESPN. The sports section (say on the right column) could contain its news and ads.
Some of the more tech savvy of you are saying, “What you are describing is a portal. It’s already here!” That’s true, however it is hard for an out of the box portal to give quite the same look and feel as the Huffpost template. We need that right mixture of typography, white space and pictures. We also need editors to uphold quality standards and to select appropriate imagery, something sorely missing from most news web sites on the web. It would be jarring if the content style looked one way in one column from provider A and another way in another column from provider B. Hence, to work, content providers and editors would have to adhere to common stylistic standards, and we would need some style czars to make sure integrated content is consistent. We are not there yet.
Local news is a harder nut to crack. However, I can see teams of regional reporters forming local content syndicates. Just as many towns are now one-newspaper towns, many areas are going to be small enough where only one content provider could survive. Cities though should attract many local content syndicates. Hopefully, there would be enough revenue from the advertising stream to support a quality content, although that remains to be seen.
Would you pay extra for featured comics like Dilbert, prominent advice columnists, local reviews and obituaries? That remains to be seen, but I suspect many people would not mind paying a bit extra for these features providing they were already on the web page and they did not have to go hunt for them. Just as it is inefficient to subscribe to multiple local newspapers to get a full spectrum of news, it is also inefficient to visit multiple web sites to get your news. You will prefer it in one web space tailored to your needs. The time savings from having it in one place may be worth paying for.
Many like me still crave a quality newspaper. We are frustrated by having to visit so many web sites to get the information we want. We also want the opportunity to learn about issues beyond our parochial interests. The right metaphor for the electronic newspaper may be closer than we think and my suspicion is that Huffpost is close. You will know which one it is when it works. (I might add that Huffpost is now one of the web’s biggest web sites, which may say something.) Meanwhile, if I were an unemployed journalist I would be working with other journalists to create rich local content like what used to be available in our newspapers. Providing there is a market, being first to market could be the key to not just surviving, but thriving as a journalist in the 21st century.
The information age gives us many more information choices than we had before, and we are busier than every trying to keep up with them. We will still want timely and relevant summarized information that is well written, insightful and well researched. Give that to us on the web and we will not only come, but open our pockets too.
April 15th, 2009 at 05:11pm
Posted by
Mark |
Sociology, Technology |
no comments
Tags: Media, Newspapers
In the mood for some nostalgia but do not actually have the money to see your old haunts? This used to be a problem but in many cases, it is not true anymore. While not exactly new news, until recently I was not that aware of Google Earth Street Views. More specifically, I was not aware how much fun they could be.
Way back in the dark ages of 2005 I discovered Google Earth. Back then it was the latest and most impressive tool from the wizards at Google, allowing you to see amazing imagery of our planet. The user interface was so slick and it seemed to know the location of pretty much everything. Now nearly four years old, Google Earth, along with its companion web-based product Google Maps feel very institutionalized. I wonder how we ever got anywhere without it.
Since then, Google kept adding features to Google Earth. You can see the stars in Google Earth, as well as Mars, the Moon and, most recently, underwater features of our planet. In addition, many new layers allow you to see relevant sets of features on our planet. Street views are a new layer that you can toggle on and off within Google Earth. You may have to upgrade Google Earth to find it and enable it. If you do, you may find your appetite for nostalgia has increased dramatically.
Street views, as the name implies, shows you the view from the street, not the view from a satellite or highflying aircraft. Street views require a lot of photography. While you can submit your own photos and they might appear in Google Earth, street views are more systematic. Apparently, Google has deep enough pockets to send out cars to traverse the nations’ highways and byways. On top of the car is a camera which every ten feet or so takes a 360 degree picture of whatever it sees. While Google is a long way from having street views of every street in the United States, it is making steady progress.
My neighborhood in Northern Virginia has yet to be photographed, but neighborhoods inside the Capital Beltway, as well as much of suburban Maryland are already available. To see street views first you have to enable the layer, and then you have to zoom in close enough to see the icons that appear on the screen. If street views are available, you will see more icons as you zoom in. If you zoom in on a street, you can see icons representing pictures every ten feet or so, indicating the exact location where the picture was taken. They appear as a little globe on the street. Double-click on the icon of interest and the scene smoothly changes to a street view. Then simply use your mouse to change direction, zoom in or zoom out.
In many cases, the street views leave a lot to be desired. The cameras appear to be programmed to take more detailed pictures near major intersections. You will find rather low-resolution snapshots in many street views. The photos may be low resolution but they are available any time of the day or night for free on your PC.
Google has yet to provide street views of Endwell, New York, the town where I spent my formative years. While I wait for them to get around to this backwater part of New York State, there are plenty of other street views that I can enjoy. In 1972, my family moved from Endwell to Ormond Beach, Florida. One of my first major finds was a street view of our old house on Capri Drive. More than thirty-five years have passed since I lived on the street, and it is showing its age. Our old house does not look as well maintained today as it did when we lived there. Our garage is gone and is replaced by what looks like it may be a home office. There is also a rather ugly picket fence around the house. The chain link fence I remember was more inviting. Still, it is amazing that I can see it at all. From the air, you look at the roofs of houses. This limitation goes away with street views.
The old Winn Dixie where I wiled away many hours is gone too, but the building still stands. The imagery is not good enough to show what replaced it, but whatever class of retail inhabits the place today it looks like a step down. The imagery of Belair Plaza in Daytona Beach, site of the first Winn Dixie where I worked, is much better but if the store is still there, it is hidden behind the trees. Just up the street, the Red Lobster where my brother Mike spent late evenings up to his elbows doing dishes still seems to be doing business.
Google has also been down the street in Scotia, New York where I spent my earliest years. I had to go to the pictures I took in 2005 to find our old house with any accuracy, since my memory was so hazy. The years have not been kind to North Holmes Street. When we lived in our house, we had a painter next door. The house next door could use one now, along with carpenters to replace it siding. It looks like it should be condemned. Nonetheless, the current occupants of our house must be patriotic because an American flag flies on their porch.
Nostalgia is an obvious use for street views, but it is also a great traveling tool. If you need to stay at a hotel in a city, you cannot only find it, but you can look around and see what the block looks like. In many cases, you can make out neighboring businesses. You can also create virtual vacations. Want to visit Paris? There are thousands of street views that you can enjoy, most with excellent definition. (People’s faces seem to be fuzzed out; I assume this is some sort of privacy requirement by the government of France.) I found a street view of our hotel in Paris with little effort and could even traverse its side street and read the window of the Pizza Hut where we ate.
Street views thus serve a number of purposes. To me they help cement in my mind just how amazingly big and complex our planet actually is. In the years ahead, I look forward to spending many hours traversing streets both known and unknown.
February 28th, 2009 at 09:14pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology, Travel |
no comments
Tags: Google, Google Earth
I promised when I got my iMac last year that I would give you periodic updates on my experiences, pro and con. Okay, I have been a bit tardy, having last written about my iMac last July. My iMac is now a routine part of my life and frankly, I give it less thought that I ever gave my Windows-based PCs. That is for the better. I now spend hardly any time fussing over my computer and a lot more time being productive with it.
I am finding that the myriad cool features that come with my iMac matter a lot less than its ability to behave consistently and reliably. I want it to work when I turn it on and go off promptly when I turn it off. I want it to be rather simple to use and wholly consistent when I have it on. Yeah, it is nice that it has a built in camera and microphone, but being introverted I hardly ever use these features. It is also nice that it takes up a lot less real estate on my desktop than my Windows PC. It is so quiet that most of the time I have to listen hard to know it is working at all. (The old PC always let me know it was alive by the continual whirr of its hard drives.) I like its wider screen and how everything looks so crisp and shiny on its monitor.
I also like how fast the system boots up and shuts itself down. My Dell desktop PC at work is patched most nights to address the latest security vulnerabilities. I generally don’t have to reboot it often, as I just log off and on. However, when I do have to reboot or cold start it, it takes many minutes as Windows XP applies patch after patch after patch. I have no idea how much money our agency spends pushing out these updates and patches to the thousands of PCs across our agency, but it must be a huge sum of money. In contrast, it takes about thirty seconds from when I turn on my iMac until I get a log in prompt. Shutting it down is faster. Leaving it in sleep mode is also an option. Applications generally run spiffily too, typically loading within ten seconds. Only a few times in the seven months I have owned an iMac have I had to Force Quit an application. (A Force Quit means the application was probably poorly written, and is not a reflection on the Mac OS/X operating system itself.) It froze up on me just once.
Like Windows, my iMac wants to be upgraded periodically, but it rarely pesters me more than every few weeks. When the software update icon jumps up and down on my Dock, it is not so often that I find it annoying. I have changed it to check for software updates monthly, so it will be even less bothersome.
What am I not doing? I am not wasting hours worrying about things like is my Norton Antivirus subscription up to date, or is my firewall sufficiently advanced, or has my machine been hacked or whether my hard disk needs to be optimized. I have yet to need to call Apple’s technical support line. I am not sure I will develop the same skills for troubleshooting my iMac as I painfully learned over the years using Windows. It’s probably a good thing that I don’t need to.
My experience suggests that the primary value of an iMac is its simpler environment, which is reliable and consistent. I expect it to be smart enough to heal itself. I assume, but do not know, that the Mac OS/X operating system is optimizing the hard disk in the background. I assume that if it needs more virtual memory it creates it automatically. I assume that if I have some vital data that it is being properly backed up somewhere. (To do this you first need to connect it with an external disk drive and then enable Time Machine.) I assume that it is secure and recently verified that my documents cannot be seen by other users on my machine.
There are some quirks. On my PC I pull out flash drives all the time without worrying about using the Windows approved method in the system tray. Do the same thing on my iMac and it gets very concerned, popping up a worrisome system notice. Just as at some level Windows is just MS-DOS with a graphical user interface, an iMac at some level is just a very fancy user interface for the Unix operating system. In the Unix world, you “mount” drives and “eject” them when you are done with them. A flash drive should not be treated like an external drive but it is. Perhaps the next version of OS/X will chill when it encounters a flash drive.
Nor is Apple immune to trying to get you to open up your wallet. It is very pushy with its iTunes software, just as Microsoft is with its MediaPlayer. Fortunately, my needs are simple. I have no desire to keep a large MP3 library. I have learned to avoid iTunes. If I want to hear an MP3 file on my MP3 player, I find it on the Internet and in Firefox right mouse click on the link, choose “Save Target as…” and point it to my MP3 player. I have no inclination to rush out and buy an iPod just so I can have the full integration with iTunes. At least I will have no inclination until my MP3 player dies and then I will consider it.
There is little cause for concern about software availability for the Mac anymore. So far, I have had little difficulty finding Mac versions of Windows software. My needs though are modest. Quicken is available for the Mac, and both TurboTax and TaxCut are as well. I just finished filing my taxes with TaxCut and it was frankly a superior experience to doing it on Windows. Of course, if you are a big gamer you may not find this to be true. If you really want, you can run Boot Camp and have Windows on your iMac. I am not sure why you would want to do that since you then have to deal with all the hassles of Windows on your iMac. It is better to do a clean divorce and get liberated.
The reality is that for me at least there is no longer any compelling reason not to buy an iMac. Microsoft has even written a version of its Remote Desktop Connection for the Mac. If necessary, I can access my desktop computer at work from home on my iMac, although it is a strange experience to see my iMac with a Windows Start button down in the bottom left corner.
One thing you can do to ease your adjustment from Windows to the iMac is remap the Control and Command keys. You can do this under System Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse. Just swap it so that the Control key works like the Command key and the Command key works like the Mac Control key. This means you do not have to relearn how to copy and paste between Windows and the Mac. Since you do this so frequently, you can save yourself the hassle of unlearning something that for many of us is hardwired into us.
The iMac is not computing nirvana, but it is where the personal computer should be had it evolved intelligently. That should be a compelling reason for anyone to consider ditching their Windows-based PC. My daughter is starting to agree, and is now saving for her own Macbook. She too has developed the expectation she should be able to just use her computer, rather than having to continually fuss over it. I suspect that when she too joins the Mac collective she will wonder why she waited so long.
February 22nd, 2009 at 01:15pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
Tags: Computers, Operating Systems
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