uniqueness-template

Yeah, so it’s been quite some time since I last wrote anything significant here.

For a while I guess I was just preoccupied with coping with life (such as it is). A whole summer that had a lot of interesting developments has gone by without me publicly commenting on them, but now I feel compelled to share them.

First, on a personal note: if the fucktard that implied that I might fabricate evidence of events that we all know happened is reading this, let me inform you that, unlike you, not everyone lies in order to get what they want.

I call this next piece Former Mac-hater goes Mac.

These days, my return to work from summer vacation is getting the lion’s share of my attention. As you may know, the budget of most public schools is not known to be all that great, but this year we were fortunate enough to be slated to receive a dozen new computers–most of them Apple Macs. This is quite a change from the antiquated generic PC-clones we’ve been limping along with for the past several years. A change, by the way, that I lobbied for and whole-heartedly welcome.

This is quite amusing to me because when I first started working at the Boulder High library 8 years ago, Macs were the bane of my existence.

And believe me, it was not due to the lack of knowledge or effort on my part. It was more due to the “black box” nature of the Macs of the time–either they worked with the configuration you had, or they didn’t. There wasn’t much you could do to reconfigure the buggers to work well in anything but a perfectly sane Macintosh environment. You could never get those damned Macs to work exactly the way you wanted to because of all the automatic stuff that they did in the background “to make things easier” for you. Unfortunately, I did not want these automatic things to occur. I wanted to exactly specify what I wanted to happen and there was no way to do so.

I had cut my teeth on simple computers such as the Commodore 64, Apple II, and eventually IBM PC compatibles that did exactly what you told them to do and nothing more. I grew up in the realm of plain-text configurations and scripts that exactly spelled out what you wanted done. I could do just about anything with DOS batch files and Windows INI configuration files. You had so much more control over the machine with DOS/Windows than with a Mac.

And then time marched on. Windows grew more and more complex and started “auto-magically” doing things “to make things easier” for you. Suddenly it became increasingly difficult to control many aspects of the computer that somebody at Microsoft decided you no longer needed control over.

Then came the final straw.

Before the modern incarnations of Microsoft Windows, the only way you could get a computer virus was by explicitly running a suspect executable given to you by someone you didn’t know or trust–or by booting the system from an infected floppy disk. Now Windows had so many unnecessary (and inherently insecure) things running in the background it became possible to become infected by simply being connected to a network.

The very thing that I hated about Macs all those years ago (automatic background processes that were all but impossible to turn off) was the cause of the woes we’d all come to deal with on almost a daily basis: spyware, worms, trojans, etc.

Meanwhile, while Microsoft was busy implementing what seemed to be the worst ideas of the Macintosh, Apple went in a completely different direction.

The system software that Macs used had become antiquated and needed to be replaced. After a couple of never-released failed attempts at replacing the Mac OS, it was decided that the new Mac software would be based on one of the new breed of free and open source Unix work-alike variants (like Linux). And as anybody who has taken the time to learn how to use any unix-like system will tell you, you have complete control of everything in the system. Apple decided to go with a true Unix descendant and chose FreeBSD as the basis for their next-generation operating system.

For several years Apple worked diligently to graft the attractive and “easy to use” interface of the Mac onto FreeBSD’s powerful and near-infinitely configurable unixy underpinnings. When Apple felt they were far enough along with this ambitious project, they released it under the moniker of “Mac OS X“. It had a rocky start, but I’d venture to say that most people who have recently tried Mac OS X would say that they have succeeded.

So, my friends, that is what has caused me, the former Mac hater, into a Mac lover.

And for those of you who will accuse me of ignoring Linux, let me tell you that I have actively promoted it’s use. My current main workstation runs Kubuntu. Unfortunately, school district policy does not allow me to deploy Linux. This may be due to ignorance, fear of the unknown, or reluctance to accept anything that is free as being “quality”. Therefore, the only sanctioned way I can get away from Windows and run a unix-like system is to deploy Macs–not that I’m really complaining.

In the our next installment, stay tuned for my take on the state of the music industry and some personal stuff you probably don’t really care about but I’m going to tell you anyway.