February 14, 2006
Mac on a PC
Slashdot has an article on hackers hacking the new Mac OS X to run on a normal PC. It just befuddles me why Apple would not want to market their software to the other 95% of the computer-using world. If 80% of those people steal the software, the revenue from the other 20% will dwarf their current revenues by an order of magnitude or so. One thing I've learned is that Steve Jobs is smarter than me. I'm guessing that in the next 24 months or so we will see OS X running on PC's in an official manner. Either that or I am smarter than Steve Jobs. Either way, it looks to me like we are about to see further increases in the OS market share for Apple.
Posted by Michael at 02:29 PM | Comments (1)
January 06, 2006
Which Linux Distribution are YOU?
zegenie studios has created a quiz to determine which Linux distribution suits you best. zegenie is a Norway-based open-source software and support company. The quiz is dead simple, with precise explanations of confusing questions. As a daily Linux user who regularly recompiles kernels, develops, etc. I didn't feel silly answering the questions.
From a user interface perspective, the wizard is worth going through because it is so darned cute. The icons and questions are quite clean, there is a persistent progress bar at the top of the survey's window—in short, a well-executed web application.
Take the quiz and see what Linux distribution suits you; the available choices include live CDs, so you can download, burn, and try Linux without changing anything on your computer. I keep a live CD [knoppix] in my car at all times, since I never know when I'll be called upon to rescue someone's misbehaving windows PC.
Example question in the distribution survey.
In case you're wondering, both Ubuntu Linux and Debian are my best distro choices; I currently run Ubuntu on all my machines (after migrating from Debian). The quiz doesn't lie!
(Via Lifehacker. If you don't read it, you should.)
Posted by Matt at 09:40 AM | Comments (1)
February 04, 2005
Interoperability
(This started out as a comment to Meghan's post about her new Mac but it got too long...)
Regardless of OS/platform wars, the goal to me is total interoperability. Good examples of awesome interoperability are email and the web. It works for everyone all the time on every platform.
An example with shared contacts is LDAP and/or Active Directory. Both Microsoft Outlook and Apple's Address Book application can talk to these types of servers just fine. In theory and perhaps in practice, you guys on the agency network could seamlessly use the company shared contacts with Address Book and Mail. We should try that. The same may be true of scheduling with iCal/Outlook.
For folks like us, the base set of tools we need is something like this:
web
email
instant messaging
contact management
scheduling
word processing
spreadsheet
presentation
All of these have associated protocols, almost all of which are completely interoperable on Mac/Windows/*nix. The only one that is not ubiquitously interoperable is scheduling. Otherwise we can all pretty much share information across platforms.
This is good. We should all be able to use whatever the hell we want.
Posted by Michael at 11:48 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack