Friday, January 06, 2006

I Won't be Switching

In his keynote address opening the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Bill Gates highlighted some of the "features" that will be in Vista.

such as a built-in photo editor that can quickly touch up digital photos before they can be shared—also maintaining an original should a user want to go back.

Can anyone say "iPhoto"? Its been shipping with all new Macs for years.

The photo editing and search features are combined in what Microsoft calls Memories, which allows a user to archive and then find photos and videos, searching by date, tags or keywords, the executives said.

Sounds a lot like some of the capabilities of "Spotlight" to me.

These nifty little features are neat, and some of them probably leap-frog what Apple currently has on the Macs. Of course, a lot of them are currently attainable through third party tools. However, lack of consumer features isn't really Microsoft's biggest problem. What Microsoft really needs to work on is security. It is simply way too easy for anyone to accidently get a virus, or ad-ware, or spy-ware, or other such mal-ware on to a Windows machine. I don't really have that problem with my Macs or with my Linux machine. Partially, the Macs and Linux box are protected by being less of a target. However, they are also protected architecturally by being a harder target to attack, especially the Macs.

Of course, even if MS did do more to secure their OS, I still wouldn't switch. Just based on user experience alone, going from a Mac to a Windows machine would be like going from a BMW to an entry level Ford. Still, since I am forced to use a Windows machine at work, I sure would like to see them do more in the security arena and less in the "flash and glitz" arena.

Currently listening to - Burning Inside from the album "The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste" by Ministry

2 comments:

sandy said...

Not being real computer literate, I have never heard of Linus. You have intriged my interest for more knowledge if you will share. If its lengthy and you would rather tell me via e-mail let me know and I will send my e-mail address to you.

stuffle said...

Here is a pretty good synopsis of what Linux is. If you are at all familiar with Unix then you will be right at home with Linux.

Also, if you are Mac OS X user and have played around on the command line a bit, you would be right at home with Linux (the Mac OS sits on a Unix kernel now).

If you are used to Windows, OTOH, many of the available graphical interfaces for Linux (Gnome and KDE being the most advanced) will be somewhat familiar, but the command line will be a whole new experience for you.

The biggest obsticle to running Linux was that it used to be pretty much a hobbiest thing that you had to install and configure yourself. A lot of under the hood stuff, and you had to know a lot about your hardware so you could re-build the kernel to work with your system. Those days are pretty much gone now.

You can even get pretty cheap machines with Linux pre-installed from Wal-Mart these days.