PC upgrades: why little makes a difference

People may reasonably marvel why they should pay much extra for having an 60GB rather than a 40GB hard drive, or a 2GHz processor rather than 1.8GHz. On the face of it, the price may seem designed for people who want the best, and the abstaining consumer may be proud to be a member of the less easily fooled. However, do consider that your operating system may consume some 10GB of hard disk space, so now you get 50GB rather than 30GB. Sounds better already? The same goes for RAM (memory); it is anticipated that the next Windows version may consume as much as 512MB of memory just to run. So if you bought 2GB total memory rather than 1GB (as a hypothetical future example, these configurations would currently be thought unusually performant *cough*), you'd have 1.5GB free vs. 512MB. Quite a difference, non? You've suddenly gone from factor 2 to factor 3.

Thinking about CPU speed is slightly more complex, because the benefit depends whether your system usage scales with the clockspeed or not. If you have lots of CPU intensive services running at regular intervals (such as a web server, not unheard of!), you will benefit from having those extra 200MHz extra, although whether you realise this, and are actually more efficient because of it, is up to you to assess. However, personally, choosing between a 1.83GHz and a 2.16GHz CPU, I would always go for the lower end. For many years, chip manufacturers like Intel have worked hard to make us believe that your computer's performance depends crucially on the clockspeed. Experts know that RAM is more important, and stuff their machines full of it. (This is partly the fault of PC sellers, who will invariably package the smallest amount of RAM that will keep the machine going. Currently, this would be 512MB. Even 768MB will give you markedly better performance, and may cost you less than a 100 GBP to upgrade!)

Kaleem Aftab

Just want to share one of my secret tips with you. I was reading Kaleem Aftab's reviews when he was still writing for The List. Best movie reviews I ever read. He really knows what to appreciate about a film. He writes stuff for the Independent these days, aside of his book, Spike Lee: That's My Story and I'm Sticking To It, and his film projects. Kaleem, let's see more of you! Miss you at The List, it's not been the same and I stopped buying it.

The BBC gave him some "my space" thing with an interface that makes my eyes hurt. Still, some might find it useful...

How many packages does your distro have?

Data from Wikipedia.

Apple pricing: Mac Mini vs. MacBook

So an extra £150 (check out the Core Duo Mac Mini) gets you a display, battery, keyboard and touchpad?

Elephant Dreams

Being a fan of Blender and its community, I've just watched Elephant Dreams. It's like a film with bad acting. Rather reminded me of that other free animation film featuring a cute robot alone in a space station, with some kind of guard robot chasing it. It was really boring.

Elephant Dreams' character animations remind me of the Plumber short film, which was actually rather good, very funny. I just wish that they'd improvised ED with real actors first.

Okay. It sucks. Sorry. Show me some open source that works. Thanks.

OS X needs a meta-window-switching key

In order to ease the transition of Linux and Windows users to OS X, it really needs an application-agnostic window switching key, different from either Cmd-Tab or Cmd-`, which change either within or between applications, and can be quite limiting to the keyboard-centric user.

Update 30/07/2006: Prayer answered.

Growl, Azureus and other GUI evils

Some of you may be familiar with the OS X add-on Growl, which displays little messages that programs send in a pop-up window that does not take focus. Other programs, such as Azureus, have this ability built in without using Growl. Windows has had this feature for a long time, so why has Apple never implemented it?

There is a very sensible reason. Remember the icons in the dock that jump up and down when an application needs attention? Rather than throwing a window your way like most Windows applications would, often resulting in text or even passwords being lost or disclosed by typing them into the wrong window that has just popped up, OS X is courteous and kindly asks the user for some of his attention, "when you're ready".

Moreover, it does so in an area of the screen that is usually guaranteed not to be used for any other purpose. Growl, on the other hand, could quite conceivably pop up in an area of the screen that the user is actually performing work in, and prevent the user from executing a mouse action, and break his concentration. Some may intuit that the problem could be alleviated by having Growl messages displayed in a separate window, which would then cause its icon to bob, being more courteous. But this is actually worse than having the original application take such action, because the user couldn't tell at a glance which application was calling him. On the other hand, applications use Growl to display many more messages than they would usually display of their own. So perhaps they should not be displaying these messages at all, since doing so would simply lead to an inflation of messages, and an all-dancing desktop. If that's what we wanted, we'd be using Windows, right?

Google and Amazon?

If someone can explain to me why Amazon and Google haven't figured out a way to integrate GoogleAds and MarketPlace, please do! It could be so simple:

The customer pays Google not for clicks, but for actual successful sales resulting from clicks. Reciprocally, Google could automatically adjust its advertising so that customers' ads appear on the page for the search results that generate the most revenue for the customer. Finally, Google could reward customers whose clicks result in revenue more often by ranking them at the top of the ads page. I haven't recently followed up the GoogleAd bombs story (you make a bot to click on competitors' ads to relieve them of their money) and whether Google has found a solution for this, but this is a solution that works because you pay per sale, not per click. Hire me? :)

Update 13/06/2006: Well, look what they did. I should stop posting.

Update 30/07/2006: As a sidenote, Froogle already provides seller ratings for some sellers.

Spotlight: Apple's grip on UI goodness is slipping

Doubtless many of you will have noticed that Spotlight returns results in a window while it's still searching its index. This is a useless and annoying feature, as you could actually try to click one of the items - it is possible - but then end up opening the wrong one because the list has expanded between your first and second clicks. Steve Jobs, I'm losing faith. Thermal paste?

Apple needs to back web-based office apps

Here I go disagreeing with Robert Cringely again.

He writes in a recent "pulpit" edition that Apple needs to develop their own competitor to Office so Microsoft can no longer boss them around. I had previously commented on Cyberdog's suggestion that Apple had introduced BootCamp to break MS Office's power over OS X.

What Cringely is apparently oblivious to is the existence of web-based office replacements such as Group Office (GPL) and ThinkFree Office (proprietary). ThinkFree in particular constitutes a fairly faithful and fully compatible clone of MS Office. However, when I last checked, it was capable neither of executing VBA macros nor of performing statistical calculations, not to mention having citation functionality that usually comes on the form of EndNote.

Great as Pages and Keynote may be from a user interface and eye candy perspective, if Apple were to invest in one of these web-based office solutions to supplement the missing features, they'd catch Microsoft up in no time, at smaller effort.

Update 28/05/2006: I'm not the only one to find Cringely occasionally flakey. Daniel Eran also has a few chickens to pluck with the controversial man. Let's see if I can take on Eran next ;)

Who's your daddy?

I'm trying to decide whether this computer is trying to look like this computer or this computer.

MacBook: user-swappable hard disk

Below the two RAM slots (at the base of the battery cavity) is where you'll find the MacBook's hard disk drive. Without disassembling the notebook, users will be able to quickly removing some protective aluminum shielding and lift the drive out of the computer.

Source: http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1750

MacBook: glossy screen

Here is the most extensive documentation yet of the drawbacks of the new glossy screen on the MacBook, now also available as an option for the MacBook Pro. Here are some more photos.

MacBook: not for the paranoid?

For instance, when you’re in a dark room, MacBook turns down the brightness. Just one of the many ways MacBook conserves energy out of the box, optimizing both AC and battery power.

Says the Apple website. Although it is possible that the MacBook has a separate light/dark sensor, I'm guessing they measure brightness using the camera. I hope either this feature or the actual camera itself can actually be switched off. Not everyone wants a Paris Hilton incident in the home. Yes, cover that camera when not in use! Did you know that Flash may be able to access your audio-in? Hah, scary...

MacBook

So the news is out.

The MacBook, now for sale, has a 13 inch widescreen display (1280 x 800 where I had anticipated closer to Sony's 1366 x 768), a mini-DVI output which requires an inexpensive (15 GBP) adapter for either a DVI or VGA socket on your display. It also features the dual-core CoreDuo processor, from 1.83GHz, where many expected to see a "CoreSolo" for the cheaper end of the range.

The anticipated black finish is only available for the 2GHz 80GB+ model, at an 89 GBP premium! Its budget nature is revealed, however, when considering the weight: The MacBook weighs in at a sizeable 2.36kg, comparing unfavourably, for example, to the superiorly configured Sony VAIO VGN-SZ110B, which weighs only 1.86kg.

We shall have to wait for news on battery life (not expected to diverge from the MacBook Pro), thermal paste, whine and MagSafe. Some people are curious about GPU performance.

The Unix-Windows security debate

The Windows guys say when OS X becomes common, it will be affected by viruses just as much (the epidemiology standpoint). The Unix guys say, no, because Unix is designed as a multi-user system with restricted user and file permissions from the ground up, so viruses have far fewer avenues for propagation (the system design standpoint).

And then there are userland macro/script viruses, where the unix file permissions don't apply, a problem common to all pluggable applications, especially where the user is a) not asked to consent to execution of a b) digitally signed macro.

That's as much as there is to this debate. Simple, hmm?

Major embarrassment for Apple: thermal paste in MBP

As nicely illustrated in this forum post, Apple manufacturers have been applying excess amounts of thermal paste to all relevant bits of hardware, hence . Not only has this led to questions whether the MacBook will be similarly affected, besides being the reason why MacBook Pros are not designated "laptops", it has even led to suggestions (pending investigation) that this problem may have afflicted PowerBooks and G5 computers, and that Apple's move to Intel hardware may have been mostly motivated by what has now turned out to be the result of incorrect application of heat paste. Yes, embarrassing!

Computers with Mactel hardware?

If anyone can explain to me why Mac OS X-compatible hardware budget offerings from third party manufacturers aren't popping up all over the place, I'll be glad to hear it - sure, they couldn't deliver them with OS X pre-installed, or they'd be liable. But there sure must be quite a few customers out there wanting a slice of OS X goodness without the price tag! (Who cares if the customers break the license terms?)

Darwine on Mac OS X

To join in with speculation by John Martellaro and others (John suggests that Mac OS X could be partly replacing its rumoured virtual machine to run XP, Vista and Linux, with a Darwine implementation for Vista), I would like to point out that Wine is almost feature-complete for XP, so Apple could give Microsoft a quicker death by quenching Vista in its pram - support XP apps via Darwine NOW, and eradicate any developer desire to support Vista (as it will have smaller market share than XP probably forever). If there are no apps that depend on Vista, consumers likely won't want it either!

Steve Ballmer foresaw it when he chanted "developers, developers, developers, developers" - unless developers use the new Vista features, the platform will die because it does not offer considerable user interface improvements in the way that OS X increments do (Exposé, Spotlight, etc.)

Windows XP API in Mac OS X 10.5?

Here goes Cringely again, suggesting that Mac OS X will fully support Windows XP apps natively; what he neglects to mention is that this would totally kill Windows Vista, as it would mean that no software vendor other than MS will develop their apps beyond the API offered by XP (since using Vista-specific features will lose them the Mac OS X installed base, while using only XP features will allow them to stop developing a Mac OS X specific version...).

So here we would have a company that used to sell its hardware because the hardware supported a unique, user-friendly OS that everybody wanted, changing into a company that sells good hardware (I doubt XP apps would be supported in Macish way (menu bar at top etc.) But then Cringely claimed in his previous column that Sony would beat Apple on delivery time, so what's happening here? Is Apple's demise in the wings? Can they survive on the quality of Mail and Preview alone (which I think will not be included in the OS X compatibility kit for Windows)?