After our recent conversation about one of the aspects I don’t like about Apple over on Dan’s blog, I just happened to listen to a recent episode of the Geek Nights podcast on which they discuss their recent (but short lived) switch to a Mac (and Garage Band) for their podcasting duties.
These guys do multiple shows per week, and until this point had been using Audacity and Rezound with Linux. They had heard so many good things about how podcasting (and audio recording in general) is so much better on the Mac that they bought one, and that episode is a recounting of some of their experiences. To be honest (even though I give Apple a hard time a lot) I never suspected that there were so many big problems, of the nature that they ran into. I’d urge you to listen to the show, and (especially if you’re a Mac person, you know who you guys are), comment here and tell me if anything was wrong, or if they were just missing something on some issues, etc.
After hearing this, I was prompted to do some searching, and found a couple very recent entries from pretty knowledgeable people who (until now) were die-hard Mac advocates (Cory Doctorow and Mark Pilgrim) explaining on their blogs why they are making the move away from Apple and to Linux.
At least this gives me comfort in knowing that my anti-Apple tendencies do not make me crazy… 
January 9, 2006 – 4:59 pm
From Creative Labs’ ZENCast site:
Podcasts, short for Personal On Demand broadCast, are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer.
While I don’t necessarily like the term “podcast” because it is kind of associated with iPods, I’m not going to try to redefine it when it’s obvious to everyone where the term comes from.
*Note: for those who don’t know, Creative Labs makes competing portable media players to Apple, like the recent ZEN release.
September 11, 2005 – 1:04 pm
In this article/interview with Kiwi Mark Borrie, he reminds users that security considerations are important no matter which platform you run on, and not to be lulled into a false sense of security just because most viruses are written for Windows.
I thought that the description for the Renepo exploit was pretty interesting. Here is a synopsis:
Dubbed Renepo (alias Opener), Ducklin said the malware: “turns off system accounting, turns off the OS 10 firewall, turns off auto updates, turns file-sharing on, opens an SSH back door, downloads and installs an open source video conferencing program and opens it in ‘do not advise the user mode’.”
The article also suggests that Microsoft has surpassed Apple in terms of their approach to addressing security issues as a company. I’ve seen a lot of what MS has been doing internally to support this, in terms of making huge (schedule impacting) priority changes in the dev plans on almost all of their products. Don’t know anything about what Apple is doing, but I do seem to hear a lot of the (false) assumption that it’s automatically secure because it’s based on *nix now, and/or there aren’t as many viruses etc. written for it. This article does a pretty good job of explaining why that’s the wrong way to think about it.
August 10, 2005 – 4:19 pm
Thanks to Dan for the link to this interesting article comparing the inner workings of Apple and MS.
Here are some quotes that I thought were interesting:
** Culture ** Very similar, actually. Both companies are filled with smart, fun people who love their work…
Apple is secretive… very secretive. Unless explicitely told otherwise, nothing leaves your group. Everything is on a need-to-know basis - you can’t even tell other Apple employees. If I wanted to find out information about, say, iPod, I would check the rumors sites. Didn’t have any chance of getting information out of my iPod friends. At Microsoft, though, you’re pretty much free to say whatever you want to whoever you want… especially within the company.
Steve Jobs is god (this is a fact at Apple and doesn’t express my own feelings ;-)). You shall not disobey the Steve. Bill Gates is just some guy…
Well, kind of…
From Information Week:
Nokia is working with Apple Computer Inc. in developing an open-source web browser for advanced cellular phones.
This is good for me, since it will be available on the Nokia Series 60 platform, which includes my phone (the 3650). I currently use Opera on the phone, which works pretty well (definitely better than that crappy WAP browser that comes on the phone by default), but has a few minor quirky bugs.
The reason I say “kind of” in regards to Apple is that it looks like they are basically doing the same thing Apple did with Safari - building it around pieces of an already existing open source browser application, Konqueror - from KDE (Linux). But anyway, it’s still a good idea.
Be sure not to miss more of my anti-Mac propaganda in the comments for this post.
Thread hijacking is the art of taking a forum discussion thread wildly off topic in the space of a single post.
While this can be an intentional act of trolling, it is often accidental - caused by other participants in the discussion responding to a throwaway remark, taking the thread off at a tangent to the original subject matter.
For an example, see this post, which was originally about WordPress, but is now discussing the Apple / Intel “scandal”.
More on Dan’s blog here.
