Eddie Monge Jr.

I finished reading ‘A sign of Macs to come’ by Matt Asay and must say I don’t entirely agree with some of the points. First thing that sticks out is this quote:

Yes, you can run Microsoft’s Office for Mac natively on the Mac, and it actually looks better on the Mac than on Windows. It works as well on the Mac as iTunes works on Windows.

Now, when I read that line, I laughed. iTunes doesn’t work on Windows. Yeah sure it plays music and videos and probably syncs to iPods and iPhones (wouldn’t know since I don’t own either and have no interest in either) but it slows computers down to a crawl. It takes up so much of your’s resources that it is ridiculous. I am a computer nerd and know pretty much everything going on with my computer so I can say that with some confidence. 3 different computers with different configurations have led me to that conclusion. I like the ease with which I can change tags and I like how good it sorts my music in the file system but I hate how slow it makes things. Given that my computer is pretty fast and has lots of memory so its not that bad, it still shouldn’t do that.

Another thing about that quote that I just thought of, iTunes doesn’t alway play nice on Windows. I remember last year when an iTunes update broke Outlook. The iTunes update did something and installed an Outlook plugin that prevented Outlook from sending emails and other weird stuff. Why in the world is iTunes trying to integrate itself into Outlook??!!?? It took awhile to figure that one out. We had to tell people that they could only install Outlook or iTunes, not both. It was crazy. Eventually they released another fix that problem but c’mon, it shouldn’t have happened.

I believe Macs have their place somewhere. I am firmly a PC guy (Not Window’s guy even though thats what I most use, but I use Linux often enough too) and don’t see what the big draw is to Macs. They are expensive (sometimes twice as much for the same exact hardware), not always expandable and are not as widely supported in terms of programs. It sometimes makes things try to be so simple that it becomes sometimes extremely easy to mess things up on your computer. Like you can have a million things loaded and then wonder why your computer is slow. All the icons are somewhat hidden on the launch bar thingie and applications can have all their windows closed but the app itself is still running.

I just don’t know. Most techies I believe prefer PCs and if they, the experts, prefer PCs, shouldn’t everyone?

Some people confuse/irritate/anger me when they do some of the things they do. Like picking a web service just because they heard about it. They aren’t sure what it does or what it will do for them but they want to use it because people have talked about it. Then they try to mold it into what they need and want, even if it doesn’t fit. Grrrr!

How about instead of taking something and trying to bend it to their will, they first figure out what their issues/problems/concerns are? Then once those are laid out, a solution will be easier to find. If you know what the problem is, finding a solution to that problem is easier then finding any solution and trying to make it fix a particular problem. When I need to hammer in a nail, you don’t see me reaching for a jackhammer or a forklift do you? No, I find the tool that is used specifically for hammering in nails, a hammer. What a revolutionary idea: use the tool made specifically to solve a specific problem on that problem. I wonder why that hasn’t been thought of before?