This is friggin hilarious!

I wondered whether Microsoft would finally have made a good stable operation system with Vista but early reports reveal business as usual.

Check this out. This is the new Zune trying to install on Windows (Vista I think.) Microsoft can't even install its own software. Ha!
and people were worried this was going to be an iPod killer.

p.s. is it just me, or is this colour the most repulsive colour imaginable?

Quicktime not the best quicktime player?

So, I have been struggling lately to play these h.264 quicktimes on my oldish pc and old iBook. Usually it plays slow and jumpy and I just assumed that my processor couldn't handle the new high quality codec - but then (for a laugh) I tried VLC player and not only can it play quicktimes but it plays them PERFECTLY! No sluggishness or low frame rates!

I don't know how to explain this.

STOP THE PRESS: All users of Macs and Pc's, Read this.

When performing a folder replace:
1. Pc's MERGE the contents of identically named folders.
2. Macs REPLACE the contents of identically named folders.

Bigtime difference between the way Pc's and Macs operate! It took me a while to realize this, but if you're replacing folders on a Mac, it does just that - REPLACES the folder (and its contents) whereas if you're replacing folders on a PC it MERGES the contents of the folders and only REPLACES files with the same names.

This is what I was accustomed to and expected, so you can imagine my surprise when I dragged a folder with like, ONE file in it to a directory with the same name folder in it, but with a gig of stuff in it and when it replaced, all that info disappeared!
(to Apple's credit, they do say "an older item with the same name already exists in the location... are you sure you want to replace it with the newer item?"

so to sum up, be careful! Macs operate differently to Pc's in this case.
(I actually prefer the PC case)

If you want to play games, you should probably get a PC

Another (small?) caveat for using a mac: If you want to play the very latest greatest 3d shoot 'em up games (as soon as they come out) you should probably get a PC.

Case in point: Doom 3, the long-awaited, ultra-hyped sequel to the Doom franchise came out a LONG time ago (like a year ago?) for the PC and has only just been released for the mac. And shock horror, all tests seem to indicate that it runs better on the PC. This is depressing, because I bought my mac expecting it to kick ass in EVERY respect over the PC - but hey, I didn't buy it for games.

So why does Doom 3 perform worse on the Mac - a machine that is supposed to be superior to the PC in every way and has had OpenGL engineered from the ground up on OS X to be robust and optimized?

Here is a very in depth article from the Doom 3 developers explaining why Doom 3 is slower on the Mac:

The performance differences you see between Doom 3 Mac and Windows, especially on high end cards, is due to a lot of factors (in general order from smallest impact to largest):

1. PowerPC architectural differences, including a much higher penalty for float to int conversion on the PPC. This is a penalty on all games ported to the Mac, and can't be easily fixed.

Read Below: Urgent

Download Firefox Now!
Stick it to the man.

The software issue

Another argument I hear a lot is that there are THOUSANDS of software titles available for Windows and not nearly that many for Mac.

Well, my argument to that (and this is just from MY point of view) is that all the good stuff - or the stuff I need, is available for Mac. I thought of analogy for this situation:

There's this music store that is small but cool because it sells ALL the music I like. Then there's this other store (in a dodgy part of town) that is a LOT bigger that sells a LOT more music, but extra stuff that I'm not interested in like Reggae (sp?) and there are a LOT of gangstas there and there are LOTS of viruses floating about, so I could get robbed, shot or get Aids if I shop there - oh and it's a bit cheaper. So where am I going to shop?

Do I have to explain this analogy? Well the music is software and the two shops are Mac and PC's respectively, and the viruses are viruses and the gangstas are hackers. There, that's my answer to the vast amount of software titles available for PC.

Oh, and if you want to play games, you should probably get a PC. I'll leave that for another post.

more thoughts on Mac vs. Pc

Another thing has just dawned on me:

Before I did my MCSE (Microsoft's Systems Engineer Exam) I always thought that my PC crashed or froze because of something I was doing wrong - and only after I studied the operating system and the applications did I realise that I was doing everything right and it was the SYSTEM that was wrong.

Windows likes to blame users or third party hardware for errors and bad drivers for things like bluescreens. But I've had a brand new computer before without any extra hardware or software installed - just installed windows 98 SE, and I got a blue screen... out of the BLUE! mmm user error? third party? I don't know... but, when you think about it, a SYSTEM of a single operating system SUPPOSEDLY being compatible with multiple configurations of third party hardware is actually ASKING for problems.

With a Mac, everything is MADE specifically for the computer and OS, and tested on the system so it makes sense that a LOT less conflicts and crashes occur on Macs.

Lastly, I'm writing this on my crappy PC at work, and I've had two crashes and two restarts and its only 11:45 AM!

My Current Software

Apple Final Cut Pro - HD Video Editing
Apple Shake 3 - Compositing
Alias Maya 6 - 3D Computer Graphics Program
Adobe Photoshop 7 - Photo and image Editing
Digidesign Pro Tools 6 - Audio or Music Recording / Editing
iLife 04:
Apple GarageBand - Easy to use Loop based music creation
iMovie - Simple video editing and titling/effects
iTunes - Ultimate MP3 Music player and organizer


With this suitcase of software (and a G5) it is my belief that virtually anything is possible in terms of creating professional quality audio and video - hell, you could produce Star Wars on this setup if you knew what you were doing!

Epic Minimalism

My iBook