Bloatso Simple.

OK, it's been just over a year since I started my 'dabble' with Linux (first Mandriva, then Ubuntu) and I suppose it's time for me to take a moment to review the experience.

First, a little background: I was a long-term Windows man that bought a PowerBook running Mac OS X in 2004. I was quite cautious in my use of the Mac platform at first, as I had tried the odd Mac (in college as they say!!) and was completely underwhelmed by Sys 7 and OS 9. And, at first, OS X seemed a little numb, with too few 'fiddler' apps and a couple of holes in the software coverage that I had been used to under Win 2000 and XP.

I then, however, began to have somewhat of a mindshift with the Mac. The operating system was extremely reliable, attractive and free of ominous malware (I know it recently got hacked on the second day of some Whitehat event, but to compare this kind of active trouble-seeking to the inadvertent 'Oh-my-god-I-downloaded-a-pic-of-Aylissa-and-am-now-running-a-spambot threat on a Windows machine is frankly bollocks). In quite an organic way, I started to use my Powerbook more and more, especially for the 95% of tasks that most of us perform in the home: email, music, photos and surfing. It didn't harm the machine that more and more free 'techy-lite' apps started to appear on the platform at this time, presumably offered by open-source wizards that had forgiven Apple for hijacking Unix and releasing what is essentially a commercial flavour of Linux. My computer had ceased to be hard-work and now performed (in the best possible way!) like a household appliance: it worked when I wanted it to and didn't brashly demand long hours of maintenance like my WinLap.

Plus, the platform has had somewhat of a renaissance in terms of market share, propped up by the iPod halo-effect, and more and more commercial apps are appearing that either compare to or exceed the quality if their Windows counterparts. So, a win for Apple then....


But, hang on, what's this? Here comes Ubuntu and bless me if I haven't helplessly shifted again. Only this time there are a few caveats to my commitment. First, the rules:

1. I will, for the foreseeable future, continue to use my Mac for the management of all those bits of personal media like music and photos. The iLife Suite is unsurpassed on any platform for this purpose and shall not be abandoned.

2. For any long-term, five year purchase of a computer product (which I am approaching still!) I will be investing in Apple hardware. It has by far outperformed any competitors wares and since the move to Intel, can be dual-booted anyway.

3. My peripherals, for many of the above reasons, are likely to be Apple-produced. The iPod is still my preferred method of blaring music and podcasts, and is only slowly being superseded by my (fabulous) iPhone. I have had literally dozens of wildly differing mobile phones over the last ten years and the iPhone is by far the best, hands-down. End of argument (!).

Ubuntu (and Linux in general), however, have really thrown a cat amongst my pigeons with their superb offerings. The same organic shift has, to some extent, occurred again. This install (the Hardy Heron) is just so sleek and fast and trouble-free that I find myself actually looking forward to booting it up to get emails and surf and whatnot.

As mentioned in a previous blog, I installed the Mandriva on an old work PC which, whilst it was no slouch, found it at first difficult, then impossible to run my new copy of Vista. I briefly toyed with the (admittedly attractive) idea of buying a shiny new PC, but the Powerbook had made that choice less simple to justify to myself and my superior female partner than it had been before. Besides, I was slightly miffed at Microsoft for putting me in this position: what was I actually getting for all this extra investment? I couldn't quite get it out of my head that I was paying to support a bloated cash-cow: that at some point in the development of Vista, they had put a load of performance-sapping legal-spyware in there, without actually doing much in the way of actually protecting its users from network assault. This was confirmed when my new install refused to work for two weeks due to Redmond believing it to be pirated.

Mandriva was a very interesting change for me because before I used it, I was fairly confident that, as a three-year veteran of using Mac and Windows, I was sure to be able to take to operating it with minimal fuss. But Linux isn't really like that to be honest. I suspect that if I had gone straight to Ubuntu, things may have been different, but I initially found it difficult to grasp the fundamental differences Mandriva offered. The method of installing software seemed overly awkward, the names of applications were unfamiliar (obviously) and with their predisposition to overdose on the letter 'K' often offered no insight in to what their underlying functions were. The windows manager was also the web browser (what a good idea for a home machine, in hindsight!) and then there was the menacing reliance on use of the command-line, something that years of windows use had relegated to the level of, say, looking up my own arse and cleaning my intestines.

The unfamiliarity grew, as I learned that my 'desktop' was KDE, but could just as easily be Gnome (two systems that initially appeared to be at odds), or even something called xFCE, or both, or all of the above. I could run Gnome apps in KDE anyway, so what, I thought, was the point? I didn't know what a dependency tree was and a lot of the terms and references for apps and routines seemed to be archaic and geeky. I was used to cocoa-y stuff on the Mac, called things like 'Fling' and 'Finder', so what was this 'CoqLDE' and 'xBFGvh008'? The whole experience seemed very modular, with no packaging, something I had initially thought about OS X, but tenfold.

Of course, anyone that has used Linux for more that six months will recognize all of these things and see them for what they truly are: advantages.

After I had stuffed the Mandriva install with hundred of apps (all in one go!) and ground the system to a halt, I very nearly abandoned the idea altogether. But a Mac magazine (of all things) ran an article on the ease of use of Ubuntu and I haven't looked back since. I have learned that all the unfamiliar elements of Linux only seem intimidating due to the very strict nature of the operating systems we are used to. But where Ubuntu excels is in its ability to thrive as an alternate OS WITHOUT having to tweak it to death. Just because the OS is so flexible, it doesn't mean that you have to use any of this flexibility to have a better experience. I now add functionality at a gradual rate, knowing full well that, for me at least, a full reinstall, with preferences reassigned is literally an hour away.

But, to illustrate exactly where Ubuntu and Linux in general excel, I offer you the package, or rather, the lack of it. Windows (and to a lesser extent Mac) is so bloated and slow due to it's continued use of .exe packages (and the Mac program-file equivalent). In simple terms, for I am extremely simple, this means that a standalone package of tools and files is required every time you install an application. As far as I can tell in Linux, this is streamlined through the use of dependencies. For example, if you install four web browsers on XP or Vista, everything needed for each install is carried it the .exe file and also the subsequent install. What happens in Linux (and what took me so long to grasp!) is that, in theory, the four installs share all those functionalities that are common to them (html, xtml, flash, java etc) from a 'tree' or central depository. This reduces the install footprint, but also reduces the stress on the machine if all four are in use. Now I know that it will be a rare event for you to use four different browsers at the same time (although before the open source community introduced tabbing, I can remember having IE open in duplicate windows), but as you can imagine, a lot of the standard tools for windows management, system resources and GUI interface will be shared by different elements of the OS. Now imagine that system-wide, and in an OS optimised to run like this. Not only does it make things run a lot smoother, but it also seems to give less scope for malware, with a much smaller base to patch up once security issues are exposed.

But how much smoother? To test this, I opened Firefox, an Excel sheet and Evolution (plus the task manager) in Ubuntu. I then opened the equivalent items in Vista and XP (Firefox, Excel and Outlook) and inspected the resources in terms of RAM and to a lesser extent CPU usage. The Mac is harder to test for me as I do not use Office on it, but I have been told that the results from the Mac running Tiger will be closer to the Linux machine than the Windows machines due to Apple's insistence on making its own hardware and the optimising scope that this affords. The systems were all tested on the same machine and I used fresh installs as I would use them in everyday life. Obviously I cannot possibly present this test as anything other than a personal indication of my needs.

The Linux machine was running all these items for a RAM deficit of 286MB. The CPU at rest was at 0-2%. The XP install on the same machine used 625MB of RAM and the CPU never dropped below 4% and often sprang to nearly 20% for no apparent reason. The Vista install needed nearly 785MB just to run with no apps and opening the three items pushed the RAM usage to 1184MB. The CPU usage on Vista is so high and unpredictable that there really is no point registering it here.

Hardy Heron Ubuntu has been around for a few months. One of the hardest things for a new operating system to manage is RAM bloat. XP has been optimised for nearly seven years, even Vista has been out for nearly two and it cannot perform three identical tasks without using FIVE TIMES more system resources than Ubuntu! And, after a year of using them both I can tell you that it shows with everything you do. The only reason I can think that anyone would need Windows is if you are a dedicated Enterprise user or a PC gamer.

Drawback? Well, for a user like me, all this flexibility can be a little bewildering I am definitely a follower when it comes to tech and .com innovation and sometimes I need a Jobs telling me what is good for me. Like I say, iLife remains my killer app and indeed the way Ubuntu and Linux is geared, it is much more as a system than its individual apps. Due to its quite limiting nature, I can't imagine Linux coming up with an iLife equivalent. Any auteur-based programming influence seems to be at a much lower level in the Linux committees, which makes sense if you think about it. There are also some gaps in functionality, or at least it takes 12-18 months for a really user-friendly Linux alternative to, say SlingPlayer to appear and sometimes, sadly, they never seem to. This isn't Linux's fault, but that is neither here nor there to a selfish end-user like me!

For that 70-75% of my computer use, however, I find myself firing up Ubuntu more often than not. Hardy Heron is guaranteed supported for the next 3 years for home users and I can quite safely say that another 3 years of this would suit me down to the ground!

Close the Windows.

Microsoft has been making noises recently about their new 'cloud-computing' platform, The Core (or the Mesh, as some call it). This has got me wondering: where is Microsoft heading?

At the moment, Microsoft is still by far the dominant player in the computing world and this is largely due to it's success in the operating system market. Now, as I'm sure you will have noticed, I think XP was fairly average (after a terrible start), but Vista is just awful. It really is!

The other problem now is that after using the iPhone for five months and then trying to use Windows Mobile 5 it has become clear that this OS is almost as bad. It used to be the best you could get by default because Palm had thrown their technological lead away by doing......well, nothing.

When the iPhone SDK-developed software kicks in, however, I can't think of a single reason to go back to WM5. The only reason to use it now for most business users in Exchange email and editing Office docs on the fly, but the iPhone is going to do Exchange better in June and, as for the Office editing, well here's my current problem: in my job, I frequently send and receive Excel files that are heavily macro'd and VB'd up the wazoo. Natively, the WM5 device I own can only open emailed Excel files in Pocket Excel, which means that because of the complexity of the files, you often end up with utter nonsense. Any third-party options by nature have to be running constantly and clunk-up an already underpowered OS by draining processor power. On the iPhone, received files are displayed as a kind of screen dump in Mail so, whilst you can't edit them, you can see them in full and with all the elements in place, unlike the WM5 option. This type of problem is by no means unusual when dealing with Microsoft operating systems.

So, what is left for Microsoft? It can go one of a number of ways. They can either continue along the path of bloated corporate megalith, trading for decades on their massive dominance in the legacy market and doing little in the way of innovation, or they can invest in what they have recently been very promising at: hardware and web 2.0.

Try to think of a piece of Microsoft hardware that is crappy. They make very decent PC peripherals, a technically alluring music player (albeit with a Sure Doesn't Play music Store) and an extremely innovative games console (the Wii notwithstanding). As I've posted before, they are currently doing some marvellous work in the area of internet software with their Live services and integrating them nicely with xBox 360. Web 2.0 services, allied to an all-you-can-eat data service would be an ideal replacement for Windows Mobile. But the amazing thing about all this is that they are nowhere near as successful in these areas as with even their shittiest product ever: Vista. Vista is the best-selling new OS in the history of computing. I know that many units are shifted by virtue of being pre-installed on new machines, but I can't think of a period in retail computing when more home alternatives are available. There is Mac OSX, the Eee PC and even Dell are offering Ubuntu-driven machines. Is it any wonder that when the Microsoft money-men are allocating funds for the next financial year, those services that are not raking it in fall by the attention wayside? What will become of Live Core?

I don't know how much longer Microsoft can plough on with creating poor operating systems. XP only needed to be mediocre to succeed, but now they can't even manage that. Far from wanting Microsoft to fail in their endeavours, I would like them to start their next effort from scratch (or as near as possible). Surely they can afford to support all their legacy interests separately from a new Windows platform. Many people are currently paying a premium to get XP on new machines, so there may even be a way to monetise this pursuit. As a Mac user, the thought of a new, cheaper competitor to OSX is tantalising, and Microsoft are the only company capable of it.

The sounds coming out of Redmond, however are that Windows 7 is coming sooner that you might think, which in turn means that we are probably in for more disappointment. It also means that the fair green shoots of promise in other spheres from Microsoft are likely to be overshadowed once more by yet another swollen resource-hungry Vistalike.

Mac Mini Power Struggle

How powerful is your computer?

This is a question I've been asking myself recently, as I'm about to buy a new machine. I'm trying to keep my options open, so am juggling between three quite different models:

Option 1.

Sony Vaio VGN-AR51J 17-inch, 2.0Ghz, 250GB HD, Blu-Ray, £799

pros: Powerful processor, Blu-Ray player, nice big screen (for a laptop), not a bad graphics chip (for a laptop), it's a laptop (so I can move it from room to room), it's a Sony.

cons: It's a laptop (I originally wanted a fixed position machine to prevent having to keep plugging and un-plugging stuff), it's a budget computer (even though it's a Sony), it has no HDMI output (a major reason for purchase was to attach to hi-def projector downstairs), it's screen is small (compared to the other options), it has Vista.

Apple iMac 20-inch 2.0Ghz, 250 GB HD, £799

pros: Mac OS X Leopard (still the best), big glass screen, more powerful due to OS and no need for Anti-Virus (why does everybody forget the system drain used by AV when comparing?)), Built-in iLife and other functions, great keyboard & mouse, remote (though quite useless for desktop environment), good permanent media hub, mid-range model, looks amazing.

cons: Relatively poor graphics chip, fewer hardware features than Sony, pricey for a desktop, no Blu-Ray, can't move from room to room, is basically a laptop when judged by its components.

And here is the interesting option (one I hadn't really considered until a few days ago).

Apple Mac Mini 2.0 Ghz, 120 GB HD, BYOKDM, £499

pros: Cheaper by £300, stylish, compact, versatile (can use it for all my requirements), powerful (for it's size), Mac OS X Leopard, iLife, Remote (suddenly useful when placed under the telly), flexibility in screen size (can be used either with 19-inch computer monitor or 46-inch 1080p telly).

cons: Poor graphics chip, is basically a laptop, no screen or control device supplied, small hard drive.


When viewed as separate entities, the fight looks to be between the Sony and the iMac, especially when allied to the rumours that the Mac Mini is due to be 'retired' by Steve Jobs and Apple. But these rumours have been flying around since just after the Apple TV was introduced, and the Mini has had two hardware revisions since then.

I can see why. The Mini was touted to be the entry-level attraction for Mr Switcher when it was introduced. It traded on the fact that most people looking for a cheap way in to the Mac fold would already have a screen, keyboard and mouse and wouldn't necessarily be looking for the most powerful machine out there. But what I don't think they counted on was how much the Mini would appeal to existing Macheads who were starved of the 'Media Centre' type computers that were being offered by the PC manufacturers. It is an eminently versatile little machine, use it as a traditional desktop, an under the telly media and recording device, a quasi-portable hot-swap client or an 'Apple TV-on-steroids'. It may be less powerful that the more expensive Macs, but take a look at all the benchmarks and it is only the gaming that suffers for this. And compared to the Sony, well if my experience of OS X vs Windows so far is anything to go by, I suspect that it will be a lot more efficient to use day-to-day than the Sony.

And what about the lack of graphical grunt? The answer is simply that I don't care. It's quite possible that any Mini that I buy would be placed next to a hulking great Xbox 360 (great machine) and an elegant little Wii (ditto). Why would I need any gaming power from the Mini? I often use Handbrake to encode my DVD's, so I suppose I'll lose some minutes there, but I've been doing that with a G4 1.5 Powerbook for so long that I reckon it'll seem like a silicon powerhouse by comparison. Also, as far as it's green credentials go, the Mini is far more energy efficient than my other two options. And another advantage is that with its small desktop form-factor, it is far more practical to retire as a mail server, a remote storage machine, or a media server (which I think are all going to prove more and more useful in the home as time passes) when it's usefulness as a main computer has diminished.

This all, in fact leads me back to the central point of this blog: how powerful is your computer? I read a great Editor's introduction to Linux Format magazine the other day that posited that an old 800 Mhz machine dumped in the loft was capable of performing 800,00 calculations per second! An immensely powerful machine by any other standards than the resource-heavy, bloatware we call an operating system today.

Processor performance increase rate is slowing down these days. We should be approaching 4.5 Ghz or so by the old formula, but the fact is that nobody except gamers and developers (and dick-measurers) really wants or needs that much power from their appliance any more. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I recently revived an old PC from its XP/Vista torpor by putting Linux on it (now using Ubuntu: not very original I know, but there it is). This extremely cheap option is now my primary computer and serves me for 80-85% of my requirements.

Should I buy a new machine at all? The only reasons I can give to justify the purchase is that I want Leopard now that a lot of the issues have been ironed out (my four-year-old PowerBook will probably struggle with some of its features), I also cannot use some of the Intel-only Mac apps. If it were not for these reasons, I suspect that I would be completely happy with what I've got already.

I hope Apple doesn't get rid of the Mini. It's ominously overdue a speed-bump and the rumours of its demise are gathering apace. The main threat to its existence, ironically, is the aforementioned Apple TV, which is a vastly stripped-down consumer version of the Mini. This product has its charms, I suppose, but doesn't appeal to me at all; not least because its main raison d'etre, the movie downloads, are not even available in the UK yet.

But that Blu-Ray player is also quite alluring.................no! No! Stop it, you Vista-toting harlot!

eBaying For Blood.

I do a little bit with eBay every now and then, when I need to clear a load of stuff out, or pick up a gadget cheap. I signed up for my account about six years ago and, after the initial excitement, came to think of it as the de facto resource for buying and selling on the web. But something has happened this week to bring to my attention something that I should have realised a long time ago:

eBay is shit.



Seven or eight years ago, it was the bees knees. There was really nothing like it around and it seemed like an exciting way to go about things. There was always a surge of adrenaline when buying or selling at auction, which went some way to replacing the retail thrill of bagging a bargain, or skillfully screwing a sale out of somebody. Every so often eBay would add to or augment the site and each change would enhance the experience, like the addition of eBay shops, the selling tools and the community features. In truth, the whole thing felt quite.....indie! You could buy or sell practically anything, and when some smart arse listed his soul (starting at 0.01p) or his shiny kettle with a reflection of him doing something perverse on the item photograph, it merely served to increase eBays profile in the mainstream.

But, honestly, can you think of a single thing eBay has done in the last three years to improve the experience of using it? In fact, haven't they become the bloated corporate blandbags that they seemed to be the antithesis of in the first place?

This week, I was selling a Nokia N80 mobile phone. It was selling really well at auction, because I had taken the time to really put across in the description what it was about the item that I liked. When I checked on the progress of the auction, I discovered that it had been removed. This was because someone (probably a competing seller) had reported my item's title as contravening his Intellectual Property Rights. Apparently, this person has sole use of the term 'as new'.

Ridiculous, right? But eBay, fudgepacking pussies as they truly are (isn't there some 'French' in that company somewhere?) arbitrarily removed the item (and so took away an hour of my life that I will never get back) and are so far refusing to refund the listing fees. I am so furious that they could not simply apply some common sense to the issue and not cave in to fraudsters on the grounds that nobody ever got sued for taking the cowards way out.

And I am not by any means alone. If you use eBay on a regular basis, chances are you will have been sniped, defrauded, let down, dissatisfied or otherwise cheated at some point. Gangsters regularly use the site to launder funds and many of the eBay shops that are allowed to trade would be shut down on the High Street for their practices. What is eBay doing to protect you from this?

Well, the answer is........nothing. Rather than assign some of the billions of dollars that eBay rakes in every year from your listing (and now 'completion') fees, eBay has decided that it is far too much like hard work to go after the fraudsters and will simply punish the honest people that will probably never cause a fuss anyway. It pumps tens of millions of dollars into advertising on television and countless promotional emails. PayPal, which is owned by eBay, has taken your banks scammy practice of holding on to YOUR money for up to three working days during a transaction and improved on it threefold. But what are they doing to stop the phishing scammers, the Romanian fraudsters and the other undesirables? Nothing.

eBay is shit. It's too big to change its ways now, but when people like I was last week don't demand an improvement, why should it?

Thank The Lord for Leo Laporte.

 

 

I like British radio, I really do. We have some top-class broadcasters, like Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Russel Brand and Wogan (can you see the link yet?). But since I got into podcasting when iTunes introduced them a few years ago, I have been exposed to the sheer depth of American hosting talent available to me and I don't think things will ever be the same again.

 

Radio broadcast in the UK has become complacent, because we seem to view it as a kind of playground for TV personalities to dabble in while their other work is in post-edit. The connection between all the British broadcasters mentioned above (other than that they are largely all on Radio 2) is that they are all more successful and famous for their TV work and radio is, or has been a secondary career for them. I know that Wogan rarely appears on telly any more, and that the rest all probably cut their teeth on radio in the early days of their career, but what I'm getting at is that we don't seem to generate people like Leo Laporte.

 

This guy is absolute class. I can't think of a more natural, silky smooth operator in broadcast media today. But he is by no means alone in this: John Dvorak (so completely at odds with his gentle Czech classical namesake!), Dave Hamilton, Paul Therrott....the list goes on and on. They appear to have a conveyor belt in the States to churn out quality in this area and it really is something for them to be proud of. If these people were in the UK, they would be huge stars on national radio, given the right content, but they seem to be taken a little for granted in their homeland. Even the independent 'garage' podcasters like Lloyd Hannemann et al seem to understand that skill in speech is only a part of the communication to an audience and that personality and a willingness to be approachable in topic is essential. Too much of even the better presenters in the UK have fallen into the self-referential laziness that can eventually isolate listeners (Brand's drug consumption, Ross' now-tedious smutty obsessions). The US alternative is extremely seductive.

 

How did this happen? We Brits pride ourselves on our refinement in language and sophisticated communication. We occasionally deride our American counterparts for their lack of them (and we all secretly feel superior to them in these things don't we? We can't help it.)  I think it is something to do with the business side of things. For some reason, it always surprises me that even the most modest of US podcasters can find a sponsor that is willing to at least partially fund their work. They certainly have a much freer minded market economy over there, with more people willing to risk more money on more burgeoning projects. We in the UK never really had the proliferation of local FM stations(partly a geographical by-product) that has created a widespread culture of excellent production in the US. UK investment in small to medium media enterprise is far less enthusiastic, with the result that there is now an echelon of ultra-successful talent at the top, with only their TV collegues bringing up the rear. Oh, and Chris Moyles, for our sins.

 

I hope that the UK uptake in podcasts can change this. Perhaps in five or ten years the freedom that is inherent with internet distribution will mean that a new generation of UK talent can match those in the US. But for now, ouvrir La Porte any day. (Sorry about that).

 

P.S. Having said all that, Fry is brilliant in his tech blog, so can we please have him as a guest on TWiT. Please?

Vista la Hasta, Baby.

Well, I've done it. I've gone and reinstalled Vista on my ageing desktop. I had it on there toward the end of last year, but had no end of problems; the DVD drive wasn't recognised and had no online drivers (are there really no generic drivers for this eleven-year-old technology yet?), the graphics card drivers were shonky and slowed the machine (P4, 2.66Ghz 2GB RAM, 256Mb Graphics Card: no turkey yet) and several of the key components of a satisfying, stress free experience were just simply not working. In the end, I gave up on it (a relatively easy decision, as I had received Vista Ultimate as a gift) and installed Mandriva Linux, which is a brilliant alternative to Mac and Windows.

I suppose I was harsher than most on Vista because I'm so used to using Mac OS X, which, despite the murmuring of the masses, is by and large free of these hassles. I've only ever had one reason to use the 'hold power switch' technique in four years of owning my PowerBook G4 (a power-cut during a back-up to a mains-powered Hard Drive) and there isn't that infuriating restart circus that you get when dealing with Windows. Productivity? There's no doubt that you can't install the majority of the apps on Mac that you can on XP, but I've got to say that I always get more done on my Mac. There's something about the way Windows works that leads you down blind alleys, installing disappointing needless apps, servicing a protection regime of anti-virus and spyware blockers that encourages me to waste a lot of time on simply messing around with the machine itself. And some of the features that I was looking forward to using most on Vista were a little disappointing.

Take, for example, Dreamscene. This feature allows you to use a video file as your desktop wallpaper (as opposed to your screensaver). I thought this sounded fantastic, and indeed the guys at Microsoft have done a really good job at getting some relatively hi-def video files to run in the background without stealing the amount of resources that you would think. I'm sure that many people like me (most Mac users appreciate a company that tries to make using a computer more palatable) if asked in a focus group would have been very positive about Dreamscene. But, in practice, the effect doesn't come off at all. It should be an extremely impressive thing to see your wallpaper moving around (the effects are pretty good), but there's no getting away from the fact that to most people it just looks like any other movie file playing on the machine. And despite the efforts of the Microsoft crew, it does affect performance, especially on older machines. Somebody at the development stage should have realised that a lot of effort was going into something that just wasn't worth it. And that goes for a lot of what Microsoft has done with Vista: a lot of real effort and achievement in slightly the wrong direction. A lot of the system is derived from Cupertino, and it does feel a little like using Tiger, but for me it simply can't compete.

So why Vista again? Well, the drivers for my various parts have largely come down the pipe, there's more and more compatible software and you can run the system a lot faster if you shut down a lot of the eye-candy. But really it was the efforts of Microsoft in the area of online content and Vista client applications that got me back on side. The Windows Live suite has got a hell of a lot going for it, as Microsoft have learned a lot from the likes of Google and Yahoo and, in my opinion, improved on them. Integration is quick and seamless, and you get a really consistent experience using these apps online and off. I own an Xbox 360 and there is also a fair bit of integration there as well, meaning that there is quite a lot of temptation for someone like me (with not a lot of spare time) to surrender my online efforts to this deserving cause. The only real downside is that I reckon most people won't appreciate these efforts as much as I do and will continue to use the many alternatives on the market. This would reduce the appeal of Windows Live, as it relies on a good proportion of friends, family and colleagues using it, which would be a real shame (I can't believe I'm taking this tack with bloody Microsoft!).

But there is a lesson here for Apple. I love using my Mac; it is no doubt the superior system. I bought my PowerBook at the same time as I bought a Windows laptop and the value for money is in a different league. Features that the PowerBook has and the Winlap didn't are almost endless; Wifi, DVD drive (the Winlap only had a CD, not even a RWCD!), large 17inch screen, silent operation, a consistent and organic operating system, Firewire, USB 2, a fast processor, large HD, the list goes on and on. The PowerBook is still a powerful laptop today when compared with even £600 Windows laptops. But Apple's online integration into OS X is clumsy in my opinion. They put a lot of uploading features into the iLife suite (which is otherwise an impeccable set of software), and offer .Mac, which on the face of it should be a more natural way of getting content online and sharing it. But £69? £69.00 GBP? For something that everyone else is getting free? And the upload speeds in the UK are absolutely atrocious. Reliability is the worst I have ever encountered on this type of product and I have RARELY had a successful backup on iDisk, upload on iPhoto or a happy experience with anything to do with .Mac. Even the email is inferior and offline more often than Yahoo or GoogleMail. The only reason a lot of people continue to subscribe is for the @mac at the end of the address.

 

Am I a .Mac subscriber? Hell yes, but only because I picked up a box at ToysRUs when they were selling their Apple stock off cheap. I got it for £9.99, but I tell you that I had to give it a moments debate even at that price. Come on Apple! Get your act together and sort out a decent free online service.

Must dash, there's a lot more Christmas cheese in the fridge and I haven't come close to blocking my main arteries yet. Happy New Year to everyone and let's hope that there are lots of good techie surprises in 2008.

Sling my iPhone, Baby.

Hello everybody! Welcome to the first of quite probably one blog entries. I have tried a few of these things before, but this Google one makes as much sense as any, because it will be a lot easier to post from any device I'm browsing on. I suppose there will be an iPhone version once the SDK has been released at MacWorld.

Incidentally, the one thing I am waiting with baited breath for is the first Slingbox software to be released for the iPhone (if it is released at all). This device is a marvellous invention, but is severely hampered for me at the moment, as I can only play content within my home network. I have a Nokia as well as my iPhone that can play content on it via 'port forwarding', but I haven't tried it yet and can only suppose that it would be a disappointment, due to the tiny screen. 

Indeed, the only drawback I can foresee for the software on the iPhone is the bandwidth available on the EDGE network. Some natty compression will have to be used to get decent playback there. That said, I tried a webpage-loading comparison yesterday, with my Nokia 6120 on HSDPA versus my iPhone on EDGE and you might be surprised at the outcome. The difference in time loading various pages on the BBC, Facebook (with the iPhone WebApp) and suchlike, was minimal; six seconds at most. If this sounds unlikely, then try it yourself: the Nokia seems to take ages formatting the page, and there is a definite delay while it decides whether there is an HSDPA signal before attaching to it. It also takes a while opening the internet explorer program (and this is one of the quicker Nokias). While the speed of the connection is vastly superior, it is the device itself that lets the side down. Don't even ask me about my O2 XDA Exec (3G) as this device was slower than both with Internet Explorer and barely comparable with Opera (although this was ruined by the excessive time it takes for Opera Mobile or Mini to load). It's not all yet about sheer signal horsepower.

This, however, means that a 3G or HSDPA iPhone will be quicker than any of these devices, but for now I am more than happy with the best 'phone I have ever owned.

Well there, I've done it. My first Google blog post. A bit geeky, I suppose, but there you go. I am interested in all kinds of stuff, but I must admit that technology seems to be taking up most of my time lately.

See you soon!