A Requiem for FriendFeed

You might not have even heard of FriendFeed before yesterday’s announcement that Facebook had bought it. Nonetheless, it’s a pretty big deal for us rockstar bloggers — if you don’t consider yourself a rockstar blogger please move along now.

Of course I’m kidding — read on and see what the all fuss is about…

Happy 25th to the Big Ugly Box

So today marks the 25th birthday of the personal computer—yes yes, Happy Birthday to you too, Ray—call me when you’re 40, okay?

[Ahem] So as I was saying… Looking at the above photo of the first IBM PC makes me lament the lack of innovation in the basic form factor of the PC over the years… Sure, there have been many updates to the basic set-up of monitor, CPU and keyboard—you can check out PC World’s 25 Greatest PCs of all Time for proof of that. But it seems to me that there’s a lot more innovation going on these days in the design of mobile phones… Maybe because they haven’t quite been standardized yet?

At any rate, I won’t argue for a second that personal computers haven’t changed the world, but I will point out that the ones I used have definitely risen in status beyond glorified calculators and word processors thanks to a certain series of tubes…

Mac OS X vs. Windows XP, One Month In

The graphic above is linked to a much more in-depth comparison of the two; I’m writing today to report my own real-world observations after four weeks of immersion in Windows XP (and a decade of using Macs). Here’s what I’ve found:

1. Looking into a Mac display is undeniably a beautiful thing. Even with ClearType enabled in Windows XP, Mac OS X does a better job at making dots on a screen look like ink on paper.
2. Web surfing on Windows is faster. A lot faster. I don’t currently have the means to measure this, but I would say from visiting the same pages on Mac and Windows that Windows is at least twice as fast at loading up a page in any browser than a Mac.
3. There’s a ton of fantastic software available for both platforms, some commercial, a lot of it free. The best free apps, namely Firefox and Thunderbird, are available for Mac, Windows and Linux.
4. Stupid people can break a Mac just as easily as a Windows computer. I have personally witnessed someone on a Mac surrender their browser to a screenful of pop-up ads, even with the pop-up blocker turned on! As for me on Windows, so far so good—four weeks in and no malware on my Lenovo laptop… Yet.
5. Apple Computer does make nice-looking machines, but as I’ve written before on the subject I can’t exactly call them reliable.
6. (The tipping point for me) Windows computers and accessories are cheaper, as in orders of magnitude cheaper. Case in point: Apple’s WiFi Base Station currently sells for $249 CAD. By comparison there’s a LinkSys wireless router on sale right now at CompuSmart for forty bucks!
7. The whole Mac vs. PC argument is ultimately for naught, as the web has all but replaced the desktop operating system, especially with this web 2.0 stuff. But if you really want to be a computer zealot you should know that all the cool kids are using Linux—I would be too if only Ubuntu would recognize my damn wireless card!

Anyway, desktop computers are sooo late twentieth-century… Smartphones are where it’s really at!