A case in point.....
| No sooner do I mention the habit of some referring constantly to the big corporates in derogatory terms than John Naughton in the Observer manages to have his usual weary tilt at Microsoft, and he gets a petty dig in at Apple at the same time. I managed to watch a demonstration of an iBook with an Intel chip inside it demonstrated at last week's BETT Show in London - its performance was simply stunning! Along with demonstrations of the new versions of iLife (and expecially the brilliant update to Garageband and the addition of a new app known as iWeb) and iWorks, the intel-Mac outstripped my current Powerbook by quite a way. Naughton, since he has a down on all-things-Microsoft, uses the fact that Apple will now be using chips from the main supplier of Windows PCs, namely Intel, to ask whether there is a flaw in Apple's strategy. I can't help thinking that his real gripe isn't that Apple are using Intel, or even that the new Macs will be able to dual-boot Mac OS and Windows (without Apple's blessing, of course) - indeed they might be able to triple-boot, using Linux too - but that anyone doing so will have to kneel to 'Satan's empire' (i.e. Microsoft) and license Windows for use on the Mac. It's all more than a little tiresome, John! There was an interesting little piece in 'Computer Weekly' a couple of weeks ago that pointed out that, of all the security bugs found in the various platforms during 2005, less than 20% of them were found in Windows. Something like 40% were found in Unix and Linux, the remainder were 'cross-platform' (not sure how that would be defined here). Of course, those 20% of bugs hit 95% of the personal computers across the globe, but that is a product of the success of Microsoft, not a reason to continually decry it with the sneering sarcasm of the academic! |
© John Connell
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