Cortland
Two new cartoons from Matt Johnson continue the Mac Wars.
Archive for May 21, 2003
Wednesday, May 21, 2003 [Tweets]
Mojo Mail
There’s a new version of Mojo Mail out, but my copies are so thoroughly modified that it will be a while before I get around to upgrading.
Depressing
Buzz Andersen, John Gruber, Chris Nandor, Ryan Wilcox, and others are saying that Apple should fix bugs in OS X before adding features. I find the fact that these people agree with me on this strangely depressing. Since I tend to be hyper-sensitive about these issues, I’ve had a lingering hope that the problems weren’t really that bad. It’s fading.
Matt Deatherage’s column in the June Macworld posits that the OS X migration is going slowly because of NeXT hubris. On the face of it, this seems impossible. Are the Apple menu, pop-up windows, and all the rest really that big a deal? I’ve written type and creator good, file extensions bad more times than I care to remember, yet I’m sitting here using OS X. Others have yet to switch (it’s more of a switch than an upgrade), and yet most of them probably have no idea what HFS metadata is.
Maybe all the changes and bugs add up to a death of a thousand strings, altering the gestalt of the system. Or maybe late adopters aren’t switching because they don’t want to upgrade all their software and buy not-so-speedy new hardware just to make OS X’s speed tolerable. Whatever the reason, the transition is going slowly. Accelerating it is probably the best thing Apple can do for itself, its developers, and ultimately its users.
Government
Arthur Silber has posted some interesting questions:
But here’s the pared down version, for both sides: you don’t trust the government an inch in one sphere, and think its interventionist efforts almost always fail -- and yet, when it comes to the other area, you believe the government can be wonderfully effective, and that it’s suddenly imbued with the wisdom of Solomon. How do you explain what seem to be directly contradictory views? And if you don’t think there’s a contradiction involved, why isn’t there?
(via Dean Esmay)
Joss
I have a confession to make. On February 21, 2003 on watched my first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (6x09). I’m not sure why I did, or why I chose then, or why I chose that episode, but I do know this: I was blown away. I spent all day thinking about it, unable to get it out of my mind, craving more. Since then, I have watched every aired episode of Buffy, spinoff Angel, and creator Joss Whedon’s other show, Firefly, from the beginning, in order. On May 20, 2003, three months later, the final episode of Buffy aired and my quest is done.
Three months is amazing. I’ve been much slower at catching up on Joss’s oeuvre, having just sent Prophecy Girl back to Netflix. There’s no way Swartz could have watched all that relying only on DVDs and re-runs so, like Greg, he used the Internet. I have also found BitTorrent useful. It has a lot of live recordings that are not available for purchase.
Quote of the Day
I don’t think any of us can really predict exactly how [new intellectual property systems] will work, but I do think that any model which fundamentally prevents people getting something they want is going to fail. We shouldn’t be trying to prevent copying, just trying to make sure that the creator of the copyright gets something for his or her work when it happens.
—Douglas Adams
