Friday, October 31, 2008

The MacBook and media longevity

David Pogue writes about the new MacBook and is sad about FireWire going away. Without it you can't repair a dead Mac from another Mac, and you can't import DV tapes.
"Last week, on the phone, I got a chance to vent my unhappiness to Steve Jobs himself. I told him about my long-held intention to edit down those 100 tapes, maybe when I'm retired.
I must admit, he gave me quite a wakeup call. He pointed out that in 10 years, there won't be any machines left that can play them."

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Note: I almost wrote: "... and laments the departure of FireWire...", but I am trying to stay aware of when I'm just imitating the generic journalist phrasing of the world, and avoiding it.

Update: also from NYT: Google settles book scanning law suit.
And MS announces an upcoming slimmer and more responsive OS, named Windows 7. They clearly feel hurt by the perception of Vista as bloated and flawed.

4 comments:

Bert said...

"[...] Windows 7. They clearly feel hurt by the perception of Vista as bloated and flawed."

They don't have feelings. They just recognize that they won't win this one, for Vista is bloated and flawed beyond any cosmetic fixes.

We've all had the impression, at some point or another, that the software industry was doing its best to support sales of new computers by over-inflating their products. But an OS that can't run decently on a fair portion of the computers currently selling? Really sounds like a bad joke.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

It can't?

Bert said...

Didn't you read about the big "Vista-ready" blunder? It was all over the place not so long ago... Thousands of computers sold as Vista-ready that can't handle the lousy alpha-channel implementation, etc.

MS can claim as much as they want that they want to see 500$ Windows machines everywhere, those platforms certainly won't be running Vista.

The whole thing was a catch-up exercise in the first place, with Linux boxes and Macs sporting incredibly sexier desktops.

So MS promised that the next Windows would have it all, right up to alien technology compatibility. Turns out most of the promised new features were trashed by MS even before they released the kludge, and that even the bling wouldn't show on anything but the most powerful graphics accelerated hardware available at launch time.

Now, before anyone jumps to the barricades, I do confess that I don't make any effort to keep current with the news about MS (a total waste of time for me). So it is probable that most hardware sold today has had all the right band-aids applied to allow it to minimally support the Vista wart, but at what performance penalty?

The word in the corporate world is definitely "stick to XP, don't touch Vista". And since that's the bulk of the paying customer base...

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Now you mention it, there was some mealy-mouthed difference between "Vista Ready" and... "Vista prepared", or some such nonsense. One of them couldn't *really* run Vista.