Fifteen minutes of fame

#1 and #2 on Blogdex!

Wow. The past day has been absolutely incredible — naïve as it may seem, I really didn’t expect all of this response to come from my little adventure.

While I had to give up on linking back to every site that linked to my post simply because there were too many of them to keep track of, some of the biggest so far have been MetaFilter, The Register, and Slashdot. Crazy. I’ve also had interviews today with both MSNBC (ironic, no?) and the Seattle P-I — I’ll post links to those articles when they become available.

Seattle PI Front Page, 10/30/03

Update: The article in the Seattle P-I is now online (and it’s on the front page of the print edition — yikes!).

Update 2: The MSNBC article is also online.

Following up on some of the many comments that have been left on my site and others where this has been mentioned:

Yes — I made a mistake

This has been pointed out many times, sometimes more politely than others. My posting of a photo taken at the Microsoft campus was (most likely) a breach of contract. The only reason I qualify that with “most likely” is that, due to my particular employment situation (a temp worker contracted to a vendor who had an account at Microsoft), I never went through any Microsoft-specific orientation or “rules and regulations” session, so I can’t say for certain that there is a “no cameras” clause as a condition of working at or for Microsoft.

No cameras?

Now, even without knowing about a “no cameras” clause, common sense does come into play here. Had I been foolish enough to take pictures inside any of Microsoft’s buildings, of the buildings themselves, of the offices of any of the employees, or anything similar, than I would fully expect to be terminated. As I mentioned in my Of blogging and unemployment post, I thought that the picture was taken in such a way that it would not cause any issues, revealing only an unmarked truck with some computers, and a small section of loading dock that could be nearly any loading dock on any building across America.

In fact, it may very well be that the picture itself is not what caused Microsoft to decide that I was no longer welcome on their campus. Again, as I mentioned in the ‘Of blogging and unemployment’ post, it appears that it was the combination of the picture with the information about what building I was at when I took the picture that prompted them to make the decision that they did.

NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements)

Many people have posited that my ultimate downfall was a breach of an NDA. This may or may not be the case. Again, because of the circumstances of my position at Microsoft, I never signed a Microsoft-specific NDA — however, this does not mean that I was not bound by an NDA. I would not be at all surprised if there were some form of NDA clause as part of the contract between Microsoft and their vendors. Now, I’m not sure if my post, the picture, or the combination of the two would constitute a breach of any NDA clause that I may have been bound to. I didn’t think so when I made the post, however given recent events, that may very well have been where I was wrong.

Who’s to blame?

In the end — me. I really don’t blame Microsoft for their actions. By my best guess, they saw me as breaking the rules — whether those rules were a “no cameras” clause, an NDA, or something entirely different — and decided that rather than give me a second chance and run the risk of me doing something similar in the future, it would be better to just cut me loose before I could do any more damage.

I can (and would) swear up and down that I would never divulge any internal Microsoft information. Heck, during my tenure at the printshop, I saw a lot of information that would have gotten me fired faster than this did if I’d been so foolish as to publish it. As “evil” as Microsoft may be popularly perceived, I don’t think it’s any secret that they have many incredibly intelligent people working for them, who come up with some truly astounding ideas. I’ve seen advertising campaigns in their preplanning stages weeks before they hit the press, I’ve seen internal documentation on programs that are still in development, and I’ve seen ideas and technologies that I would love to have available on my Mac at home. None of those have ever been mentioned here in my weblog, and even now, this is the most I intend to say about them.

However — while I may not have seen my post as violating Microsoft’s security standards, someone there did. Because of that, they may feel that it’s not worth the risk of continuing to allow me access to proprietary information that I could, in theory, leak to the world.

I may not like the way that they handled this. While I didn’t plan for my post to generate the amount of attention that it’s received, it has, and now Microsoft is facing a certain amount of bad press because of that. It may have been far better for them (on a PR level) to reprimand me and have me take the post down. However, I cannot fault them for making the decision that they did, however much I wish that that they had made a different decision.

I goofed. I regret it, but the damage is done. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. ;)

Future employment

I’ve seen a lot of comments suggesting that I apply to Apple — even some stating that Apple should just give me a job. As amusing as this idea is, I have to say that even I find it entirely unrealistic.

First off, as some have pointed out, my post could be seen as indicating that I have a propensity for disclosing internal company information. That’s not likely to put me very high on the list of prospective candidates for any business, let alone one run as tightly as Apple.

More importantly, though, is the simple fact that as my resumé shows, I’m woefully under-qualified for many computer-based positions. I don’t have a college degree. I don’t have any sort of computer certification. Aside from the past eight months, I haven’t even held a position that was primarily computer based. Instead, I’ve spent ten years working in the quick-print industry, running high-end digital copiers.

This isn’t to say that I’m a computer illiterate, of course. I’ve been a fairly typical “computer geek” for most of my life. I have experience with a wide range of systems, starting with CP/M on an Osborne 1, a few different flavors of *nix, DOS and Windows based PCs, and my primary focus, Apple Macintosh computers. I like learning about how all of the bits and pieces work, and how they work together. I’ve been fascinated with HTML for years — my first website went up in 1995, and I’ve been “blogging” in one form or another since 1998 or 1999, though I only have archives dating back to November of 2000 — and while I may not be much of a designer, if I may toot my own horn for just a moment, I think that my HTML code is damn good. I’ve spent a little time mucking around with Perl, Java, and Javascript, not enough to be a programmer (by any stretch of the imagination), but enough that I can take a look at the code and at least get a general feel for what it’s doing.

All of this, though, is self-taught. And self-taught doesn’t really get you jack, for the most part, especially when it doesn’t show on your resumé. My biggest regret with all of this is that, as my position for the past eight months has been working in a prepress environment, getting digital files print ready, I was finally getting some resumé experience that could show that I really did know something about computers. Now, however, I’ve lost that position, and I’ll just have to hope that if I’m lucky, those eight months might be enough for someone to give me a chance again at some point.

In the end, it all comes down to hitting the streets, throwing my resumé around town, and seeing what comes up — and hoping that when an interviewer googles my name, all this brouhaha doesn’t scare them off!

Rent (or “Wow — you all rock.”)

While I’m sure after reading the article at The Register that many people will find this hard to believe, I originally only mentioned financial matters because I had had enough people inquire that it was easier to do it in a single post than e-mail everyone. I’ve never expected donations in the past, and I wasn’t expecting donations this time.

Quite honestly, I’m floored.

An incredible number of people have tossed a few dollars my way, and I really don’t know how to thank you all. It’s enough to ensure that my rent for the month is taken care of without having to hit my emergency stash, and just a little over (which will go for good cheap eats — like Top Ramen, the bachelor’s/college student’s/first-time-apartment-dweller’s food of choice!). Many, many thanks, karma points, and mojo out to all of you. You rock.

Surviving Slashdotting (or, “Commercial time!”)

Lastly, but definitely not least, I’ve had quite a few people inquire about the weblog itself — specifically, who hosts it, and how it’s managed to stand up to the abuse of a Slashdotting as well as it has.

My site is hosted by TypePad, from the same good people that produce MovableType. I used MovableType for quite a few years on a personal server running out of my apartment (thank goodness I’m not using that setup now — my poor lil’ G3 webserver would be in puddles on the floor by now!), moved to TypePad when I got the invitation to be part of their public beta test — and have stuck with it since.

As I’m a confessed HTML geek, I find TypePad’s pro level perfect for me. They take care of all the niggling little details of server management, and I still have full control over all the HTML code produced by the system. I can be as picky (ahem…anal) as I want about the code that my site produces, and I do what I can to ensure that the pages are as clean as possible — minimal graphics, standards compliant code that’s easy to read if someone should dive into the source, CSS for presentation, and all the rest of the current buzzword goodies.

I can’t recommend TypePad enough — or MovableType, if you prefer to handle the server end of things yourself. I’m also very grateful to them for handling my Slashdotting (their first, apparently!) with such aplomb. As far as I know, there were very few glitches over the course of the day.

Conclusion

So what have I learned from all of this? Well, firstly, and most importantly — keep my big fat mouth shut! ;)

Some people have made comments along the lines of, “this is why I blog anonymously.” I have to say, that I don’t honestly think that that’s necessarily a perfect solution. Given the well-known power of Google, it’s very easy for me to believe that many anonymous blogs are — or at least could be — far less anonymous than their authors might believe. A comment here, a phrase there, a certain choice of words, and suddenly, someone’s put the pieces together (“They said that their birthday was on or around this date, they got together with this group of friends here, they took a trip to Disneyland here…”) and they are suddenly “outed”.

I made the conscious choice a few months back not to blog anonymously. Prompted by a post by Anil Dash, I decided that given the All-Seeing Eye of Google, I would rather do what I could to “own” my own name. I stopped using my prior online pseudonym of ‘djwudi’, began using my given name of Michael Hanscom whenever leaving comments on sites, and registered the www.michaelhanscom.com domain name. To me, the ability to have some amount of control in ensuring that information that is connected to my name is actually connected to me is worth the risk of situations like what I just went through.

Basically, it all boils down to making sure that you know just what your employer would or would not be comfortable with you mentioning on your weblog — and if there’s any doubt, don’t mention it. I didn’t, and it got me canned. You shouldn’t let the same thing happen to you.

Thanks much for all the attention, comments, and food for thought over the past few days. It’s been a bit overwhelming, but one hell of a ride.

Even Microsoft wants G5s

UPDATE: Please take the time to read my followup post, Fifteen Minutes of Fame, for my thoughts on what happened after I posted this picture, why it happened — and most importantly, why I don’t blame Microsoft for their actions. Thanks!


It looks like somebody over in Microsoft land is getting some new toys…

Microsoft's shipment of G5s come in

I took this shot on the way into work on the loading dock (MSCopy, the print shop I work in, is in the same building as MS’s shipping and receiving). Three palettes of Dual 2.0Ghz G5’s on their way in to somewhere deep in the bowels of Redmond. Hopefully they’re all in good condition when they arrive — the boxes are slick enough that a few of them took a bit of a tumble (you can see them back in the truck)!

Meme 2: iTunes

iTunes FoldersAnother meme that Kottke pointed out — iTunes usage methods.

How you organize your music can be as important to someone as what music they listen to. For me, with a personal CD collection currently somewhere around 1,200 discs, organization becomes extremely important. Luckly, iTunes has everything I need in order to keep track of what I have, find things easily, and discover music I hadn’t heard in a while (and at times, didn’t remember that I even had).

One of the godsends of iTunes is the “smart playlists” feature — I use smart playlists almost exclusively (they’re the purple-colored icons in the screenshot). Essentially, a smart playlist allows you to set certain criteria that determine what songs are in the playlist, which is then automatically updated by iTunes. For instance, I keep three smart playlists synced to my iPod at all times: “new additions”, “random unplayed”, and “random 1gb”.

  • Random 1Gb: the single most important playlist, for me. This randomly grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that 1) I haven’t listened to in the past 2 months, 2) is rated three stars or above, and 3) isn’t in the “Christmas” genre. Whenever I listen to a song, it removes it from the playlist, and grabs another one. This syncs with my iPod, and as the iPod tracks what I listen to each day, the playlist is automatically updated at night when I get home from work, and in the morning just before I leave. The end result — roughly 20 hours of songs that I know I like, but haven’t heard in a few months.

  • Random Unplayed: this playlist grabs one gigabyte’s worth of music that I’ve never listened to. This comes in handy when I’m importing a lot of music (like now, as I re-import all 1200 CDs to AAC rather than .mp3) — as long as there’s something in this playlist, then I know that there’s songs that I haven’t listened to yet (either just to listen, or to check to ensure that the rip was completed successfully).

  • New Additions: this is, quite simply, any songs that have been added to my library within the last two weeks. Great for being able to explore a new album right after buying it.

Other smart playlists that come in handy: “recently played” (anything I’ve listened to in the past two weeks, handy for tracking down something I know I heard recently), “top 25 played” (a pesudo-best-of list), “top rated” (any songs rated four or five stars), and the various by-year playlists (listening by era can be quite interesting sometimes).

The only two “normal” playlists I have at the moment are one for Poems for Laila (from when I was making CDs for Prairie last weekend), and one for Sony’s excellent Soundtrack for a Century collection. Other than those two, it’s all smart playlists for me.

The MovableType/Mac conspiracy…

Another IM conversation, investigating the MovableType/Six Apart/Mac/Apple conspiracy…

Me: i’ve got a blogger account for a side project of mine, but it’ll probably be moving to TypePad pretty soon
Me: i can’t do anything on a free Blogger account, and if I’m going to give someone money, I’d rather have it be the Trotts

Phil: Keep it for testing at any rate, could you? I don’t really know anyone who uses Blogger and has a Mac.
Phil: Other than me.

Me: sure, will do

Phil: The Mac populace seems to prefer MT, interestingly. Except the people at Forwarding Address: OS X.
Phil: Hm…. maybe I could get Cory Doctorow as a beta tester. That’d be amusing.

Me: i’ve noticed that, actually – been pleasantly surprised at how often Macs get mentioned on TP blogs

Phil: Interesting correlation, really, if you think about it.
Phil: People who use Blogger often go on forums and curse about how unreliable and buggy it is.
Phil: People who use Windows often go on forums and curse about how unreliable and buggy it is.
Phil: People who use MT are often like “Look at this cool trick I can do with my blog!”
Phil: People with Macs are often like “Look at this cool trick I can do with my Mac!”
Phil: Do you see a trend?
Phil: I think maybe Movable Type is the Mac of the blogging world.

Me: i think you just get in a mindset…using computer == dealing with bugs (if you’re on the Windows side)

Phil: Same way with Blogger.
Phil: Using Blogger == dealing with bugs.
Phil: Oh!

Me: Is Six Apart the New Apple?

Phil: Yeah, I saw that.
Phil: And (using Blogger/using windows) == no help at all from the parent company.
Phil: Well, except the UNIX geeks and developers.

Me: ‘zactly
Me: and us Mac users are spoiled by the “It Just Works” syndrome

Phil: True.

Me: MT “just works” – and you never have to deal with the underlying code if you don’t want to
Me: OS X “just works” – and you never have to deal with the terminal if you don’t want to
Me: but in both cases, if you do want to, a whole world of new toys and possibilities open up

Phil: Hacks, plugins, new applications you’d never even thought of.
Phil: And I could be talking about either one with that last sentence.

Me: bingo

I think we’ve got something here!

Newly Digital (Back in the Day, redux)

Adam Kalsey has started a project he calls Newly Digital — a collection of stories about when people first discovered computers, got online, and so on.

In that vein, I’m updating and reposting my “Back in the Day” post from roughly a year ago, to contribute to the project. Enjoy!

The first computers I can remember playing with were the Apple II‘s that my elementary school had. Before long our friends the Burns had one of their own that I got to play with, while my babysitter picked up a Commodore 64 that gave me my first look at the BASIC programming language.

Eventually, my family got our first computer — an Osborne 1. This was a beast of a machine. 64k of RAM, a Z-80 CPU, two 5.25″ floppy drives, and a 5″ monochrome 80×40 greenscreen, all packed into a case the size of a suitcase that weighed about 30 pounds. The keyboard could be snapped up against the face of the computer, allowing it to be carried around — one of the first, if not the very first, “portable” computers! It ran CP/M (a precursor to MS-DOS) — aside from fiddling with the machines at school or at my friends’ houses, my first real command-line experience! There was a 300 baud modem available for the Osborne 1 computer, however my family didn’t get one until years later (when those of our friends who had also had Osborne 1 computers were giving them to us as they upgraded, allowing me to cannibalize parts from two machines to keep one running).

I first got online sometime in 1990, with the first computer I bought myself — an Apple Macintosh Classic with no hard drive (the computer booted System 6.0.7 off one 3.5″ floppy, and I kept MS Word version 4 on a second floppy, along with all the papers I typed that year), 1 Mb of RAM — and a 2400 baud modem. Suddenly an entire new world opened up to me. After a brief but nearly disasterous flirtation with America Online at a time when the only way to dial in to AOL from Anchorage, Alaska was to call long distance, I discovered the more affordable world of local BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems).

I spent many hours over the next few years exploring the BBS’s around Anchorage, from Ak Mac (where most of my time was devoted) to Forest Through the Trees, Roaring Lion, and many others that I can’t remember the names of at the moment. I found some of my first online friends, many of whom I conversed with for months without ever meeting — and many that I never did meet. Most of the Mac-based boards used the Hermes BBS software, which shared its look and feel with whatever the most popular PC-based software was, so virtually all the boards acted the same, allowing me to quickly move from one to the other. After springing the $300 for an external 100Mb hard drive (how would I ever fill up all that space?!?) I downloaded my first ‘warez’ (bootlegged software), at least one of which had a trojan horse that wiped out about half my hard drive. I discovered the joys — and occasional horrors — of free pornography. I found amazing amounts of shareware and freeware, some useful, some useless. It was all amazing, fun, and so much more than I’d found before. In short — I was hooked.

After I graduated from high school in 1991, I had a short-lived stint attending UAA (the University of Alaska, Anchorage). One of the perks of being a student was an e-mail account on the university’s VAX computer system. In order to access your e-mail, you could either use one of the computers in the university’s computer lab, or you could dial into their system via modem. Logging in via modem gave you access to your shell account, at which point you could use the pine e-mail program. However, I soon learned that the university’s computer was linked to other computers via the still-growing Internet!

I thought BBS’s were a new world — this Internet thing was even better! Suddenly I was diving into ftp prompts and pulling files to my computer from computers across the globe. Usenet readers introduced me to BBS-style discussions with people chiming in from all over the world, instead of just all over town. I could jump into IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and have real-time conversations with people in other countries. The gopher protocol was essentially a precursor to the World Wide Web, textual information pages linked to each other by subject. I was fascinated — more information than I had dreamed of was at my fingertips.

By the time I left UAA and lost my student account, the ‘net had started to show up on the radar of public consciousness, but still at a very low level — it was still fairly limited to the ‘geek set.’ That was enough, however, to have convinced some of the local BBS systems to set up primitive (but state of the art at the time) internet links: once a day, generally at some early hour, they would dial into a special node on the ‘net and download a certain set of information, which the BBS users could then access locally. It was slow, time-delayed, and somewhat kludgy, but it worked, and it allowed us to have working e-mail addresses. It wasn’t what I’d had while at the university, but it was certainly better than nothing.

Within a few years, though, the ‘net suddenly exploded across public consciousness with the advent and popularization of the World Wide Web. Suddenly, you didn’t have to do everything on the ‘net through a command line — first using NCSA Mosaic, and later that upstart Netscape Navigator you could point and click your way through all that information — and some of the pages even had graphics on them! It was simplistic by today’s standards, but at the time it was revolutionary, and I joined in that revolution sometime in 1995 with my first homepage.

Since then, there’s been no turning back. My computers have been upgraded from that little Mac Classic to a Performa 600/IIvx, from that to a PowerMac 6100, then on to a 6500, through an original Revision A iMac, and now consisting of a Blue and White G3, a custom-built PC (the first Windows-based PC I ever owned), and currently a Dual 2.0Ghz PowerMac G5, and currently a 27″ iMac, and now a 27″ Retina 5K iMac, and now an M1 Mac mini desktop and M2 MacBook Air. My website has grown as well over the years, passing through several intermediate designs to its current incarnation hosted off my G3 through the UN*X-flavored goodness of Mac OS X.

To quote Jerry Garcia, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I’m only looking forward to seeing where it takes me from here.

Beyond the rumor sites

MacWorld Expo SF is coming up next week, which normally has the various Mac rumor sites all a-tizzy trying to predict what may or may not appear. This time, around, however, Apple — rather than staying their characteristically silent self — is doing the online equivalent of tossing a goldfish into a pirahna tank, through the posting of oh-so-subtle headlines like ‘Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond.’ to their website. Now, now, shouldn’t tease the animals….

— AtAT’s take on Apple‘s apparent plans to make their most rabidly loyal followers’ heads implode.

[From Usenet: 1.2.02 0143]

[Note: This was originally a post to the alt.sys.mac.newuser-help Usenet newsgroup. I’m including it here for completeness. Originally archived here.]

Albert –

First off, I hope your experiences with OS X continue to improve, as you indicated they had started to in a followup post. Figured I could go ahead and jump in the fray, though… ;)

In article <asteg-5FD600.02164401012...@news.mindspring.com>, Albert Steg <as...@mindspring.com> wrote:

The installation process disbabled my Enternet software, crippling my internet access, and even when I got back to system 9 I found my internet aliases (eudora and netscape) hidden from my desktop and replaced with Explorer. Felt like a Microsoft ploy.

That’s something of a surprise. Each time I’ve done an OS X install (starting with the Public Beta), it’s gone smooth as silk. Really unsure as to what may have gone on to actually disable anything.

…and the interface is totally new, isn’t it?” Why is there no warning or explanation in the manual that this system represents a radical departure from the Apple of the past 15 years?

Well, it’s definitely a new system, but the manual I got – while really underwhelming – did at least have a cursory “this is what you’re gonna get” feel to it. Much as ‘puter people sterotypically go with a “install first, read later if something explodes” attitude, sometimes it can be helpful to at least flip through the documentation at least once first… ;)

I am, along with others, somewhat surprised that you were caught so completely off guard – wherever you’ve been, you must have been really out of touch. If you start poking around the web, though, there’s a lot of good information on all the various changes, both why they were done and what the various repercussions are. The OS X manual that Carl linked to (http://homepage.mac.com/rgriff/files/osxguide2.pdf) is a good start, I’d also recommend spending some time digging through Mac OS X Hints (http://www.macosxhints.com/), lots of good info on there.

Am I alone in being dismayeed and bewildered here? These huge Playskool-style icons,

These can be scaled up and down to your preferences…they are a wee bit on the big side by default.

the inability to open two windows at one time

You can have more than two open at once. Check your System Preferences and View Options (under the Finder’s View menu) for the various options there.

…the oily, gimmicky sluuuuurping of windows

Some people like the ‘genie’ effect, some don’t – I’ve switched it to the ‘scale’ effect, as it’s a bit less processor-intensive (and therefore a bit quicker on my machine).

down to the Windows-like “dock”

It takes some getting used to, but I’ve found the dock to be a very nice addition (though, I’ve gotta admit, I’ve liked certain aspects of the Windows taskbar too). I keep my dock devoid of any aliases, so that I don’t have to try to distinguish between icons of running aps and icons of apps that I can run if I want, and only use it for whatever’s running at the moment. For me it works much better as a application switcher than as a launcher, but different things work for different people…experiment with it a bit, after the initial shock, you may find it more to your liking.

instead of the crisp windowshade feature of previous systems….

As has been noted by a couple people, there is a shareware program that will bring windowshading back to OS X (though I don’t use it myself).

these are improvements?

Overall, yeah…just improvements with a bit more learning curve than has been necessary for past OS updates. But then, past OS updates didn’t completely rewrite the OS from the ground up, either…. :)

How about an explanation of the itools program, rather than just thrusting it at you in the config process?

Apple would do well to explain this a bit more. However, breifly, iTools isn’t so much a program as it is a set of services that Apple provides that you can use or ignore as you like. It includes free e-mail with a mac.com suffix, an online storage space (your iDisk), and some other features that can be explored in more depth on Apple’s iTools site (http://www.apple.com/itools/). You don’t have to use any of them, though, if you don’t want or need to.

Can I use Eudora instead of Itools. . .

Yup – I think there’s even an OS X version of Eudora out by now. Check VersionTracker (http://www.versiontracker/macosx/) to be sure.

or do I have to use Itools to access eudora now?

Nope, though you probably can use Eudora to access your iTools mac.com e-mail account if you’ve set one up (though I’m not 100% sure on that).

. . . granted I have to give it a chance, but I am not looking forward to this.

Well, go ahead and poke around, play for a while, and give it that chance. There’s some culture shock – especially since you apparently didn’t know what you were in for – but it’s not that bad once you get used to it.

Heaven forbid that happen!

Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name…without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art.

— Bill Gates, 1983 (New York Times, 25 Sep 1983, pg. F2)

I love finding things like this…

…I found this over on /. in the middle of a discussion about Mac OS X. While probably only of interest to my more ‘geeky’ friends, I think it’s damn cool….

Mac OS X is better than I could have imagined!

Let me begin by saying that I used to be a rabid, frothing at the mouth Linux/UNIX advocator. I’ve been using Linux exclusively for nearly two years.

Anyways, when I found out about Mac OS X, I was very excited. I wanted to try it. The interface looked so incredibly well done. Whoever says that Windows has a nice user interface must be joking; I think that the Windows GUI is extremely bland.

So I bought an iMac 233 for a steal over at eBay. I ran Mac OS X Public Beta for many months in anticipation of the final release.

The day the final release came out, I was so impressed with Apple hardware and the beta, that I ran out and bought one of the new iMacs just so that I would have the extra speed boost in running OS X.

Anyways, let me say that I have not been disappointed in the slightest! OS X is everything that Linux should have been. It’s powerful enough for the command line lovers, but elegant enough for the common desktop user. I don’t care what anyone says; Linux is not ready for the common user.

Common Linux scenario. I’m running KDE with some GNOME apps, along with Netscape 4.77 and emacs. Say I want to change my computer’s theme. That means I have to find a KDE theme, a GTK theme (and figure out how to install it from KDE), and edit my .Xdefaults file, testing new values for Netscape and emacs until everything is the way I want.

That’s just too inconvenient. In fact, after running OS X for a week now, I found that there were a lot of annoying inconveniences that I put up with in Linux that I don’t have to deal with in OS X. It got to the point with Linux where I was saying, “I’m so tired of constant sysadmin battles…I just want something that works.” You know what? Mac OS X just works.

Not to mention the fact that I find Apple hardware far superior. There’s none of the Intel Driver Hell that I’ve dealt with using other OSes. I plugged in my iMac (which was equipped with CDRW, ethernet, modem, etc…) and everything worked, no tweaking necessary.

What I like the best is the XonX program that a bunch of sourceforgers are working on. By hitting Command-Alt A, I can switch back and forth between my old XFce desktop and my new, spiffy Aqua desktop.

To those who say that Apple hardware is too expensive…yes, the powermacs and the cubes are still fairly high in price. If you’re looking to play around with OS X, pick up an iMac. They’re very reasonably priced machines that pack a lot of power.

— vorpal^