Something has been bugging me for the last few months. Though I got my nice new Mac and switched to using it has my main personal desktop/laptop machine, it's been a frustrating experience at times. Back in 2002 when modern version and make the Compaq nc6000 laptop that I got at work. It runs Windows XP Professional and is a very nice little machine, though I'd prefer something with more than 512MB of memory. (Mental note: get a RAM upgrade in this notebook). It has 802.11g, Bluetooth, and very good battery life so far (on par with the Powerbook). And the keyboard kicks ass. Do not underestimate how important a good keyboard is! The funny thing is that I spent quite a bit of effort making my Powerbook work on the Yahoo network as seamlessly as possible. Through quite a bit of SSH port forwarding magic, I got it 90% of the way there. I was able to access mail, LDAP, printing, CVS, TWiki, and so on. If any Yahoo's want to know what it takes to make your Powerbook work well on the corporate network, eating our own dog food. The vast majority of our users are on Windows. When product folks ask for my feedback on our internal New features in LAUNCH? Same thing. The newest The OpenCD for a collection of useful Open Source on Windows tools. The Mac's Role The Mac isn't going to collect dust. I still use Flickr plugin are still my preferred way to deal with digital photos. iTunes, my iPod, and the iTunes Music Store are still the center of my personal music world. I'm toying with an eval copy of Open Office on the Mac. The Mac is my media computer. I see it handling my audio/video/entertainment needs for the forseeable future. The iPAQ Factor I expect to be getting an iPAQ in the next month or two. I'll mainly be using it as a portable flight computer when I fly (probably with WinPilot), but I want to play with other stuff on it as well. Since it runs a lot of effort. The only viable choices (for me) are Mac OS X or Windows XP. And Windows lets me:
- feel like I'm getting more out of the hardware
- stop fighting the Mac's usability problems (the tab key being useless in most dialogs, the lack of hotkeys in most apps, the X11 requirement for some apps)
- have decent power management-almost as good as the Powerbook
- get full IT "support" at work (meaning that I get on the "real" network and don't need to do all that tunneling crap) I'm not sure what it will take for Linux to get there. Microsoft wins this round. Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Yahoo! Search blog as well. Visit Jeremy's blog:
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