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June 29, 2005
Mac Switchback
I'm a Mac guy. Bought my first one in 1987, replacing my trusty old Apple IIe, and stuck with the Mac through Apple's subsequent travails. Heck, I even owned a Mac clone. Somewhere along the way, though, I gradually migrated to Windows machines. I fell in love with IBM's sensual trackpoint, got comfortable with Microsoft's increasing respectable operating system releases, and wondered occasionally when I'd come home again. Inertial of one form or another always kept me on Windows... until now.
With a little help from my Wharton research budget, I bought a Powerbook and assorted goodies, and I've spent the past few days migrating things over. The experience isn't entirely familiar -- my last Mac ran OS 9 -- but I'm getting used to it. Overall, the machine is great, and I'm quite happy I made the switch. But I've had my share of annoyances.
First and foremost, damn is this thing slow! I have the fastest laptop Apple makes, a 1.67 GHz G4 Powerbook 15" with 2 GB of RAM. And it still drags. Things that felt instant on my two year old Windows laptop (like opening a new tab in Firefox), take a noticeable beat on the Mac. Opening applications and many other activities are beachball city. It's not un-usable slow, but it's annoying-slow. I can only hope that, come 2007, those Intel chips will give Apple the horesepower to build a laptop that runs as fast as it should. If so, I'll be one of the first to buy one. If not, I may rush back into the arms of my old friends at IBM/Lenovo.
Moving data isn't quite as painless as I hoped. Several hours of futzing with Automator, BBEdit, an FTP application, and QuickKeys failed to produce any automated way to change the line breaks in my Eudora mailbox files so they open in the Mac version. So, moving over my 775 MB of mail files is taking forever.
For some reason, multiple USB 2.0 hard drives either failed to show up on the Mac desktop or took forever (at least 20 minutes) to mount, despite working flawlessly with my Windows laptop. I thought "it just works" networking was an Apple strength, no? That made moving files much tricker than it should have been. I also haven't been able to get the Powerbook to print over the Internet to a networked printer with an IP address, which my Windows machine found painlessly.
And some things that should be trivially simple still elude me. For example, is there really no way to pull the trash can out of the Dock and put it on the desktop? Having to control click and select "move to trash" whenever you want to delete a file is a pain. I know, RTFM, but this seems like the sort of thing one should be able to figure out.
Then again, so far I haven't had any of the annoyances that randomly popped up on my Thinkpad, like the machine suddenly deciding (on two occasions, a year apart) that its modem driver prevented it from entering sleep mode. So I really shouldn't complain. I just wish my Mac was perfect, rather than merely great.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:37 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Supernova 2005 video
Mary Hodder put together a delightful short video (Quicktime format) of highlights from Supernova 2005.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 20, 2005
The FCC Loses its Memory
One non-Supernova event signficant enough to note here. Bob Pepper, Chief of Policy Development at the FCC and my former boss and mentor, is leaving the Commission. (He just told me the internal email went around announcing his farewell party, so that makes it official!)
Pepper is irreplaceable. He's the institutional memory of the FCC on pretty much every important policy issue. And he has been at the center of tech policy strategy at the FCC since before the commercial Internet emerged. I don't have time right now for a fuller appreciation, but it's a great loss for the FCC.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:27 PM | TrackBack
Supernova 2005
Supernova 2005 starts today in San Francisco. I can't wait.
To the extent I blog during the next few days, it will be on the Supernova 2005 Weblog. And we'll have lots of other great user-generated content on our Community Connection. If you're not attending Supernova in person, that's a great way to follow some of the action happening here at the conference.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:43 AM | TrackBack
June 3, 2005
The value of openness
In a New York Times article today about AOL's future, one of its excutives makes a remarkable comment:
"My biggest problem is the walled garden," said Mr. Kelly, who runs all of AOL's Web properties in addition to ad sales. "The world can't see the good stuff we do every day."
This is AOL, the company that virtually defined the model of keeping information off the public Internet and available only to its subscribers. It now realizes, at least to some extent, the positive network effects of openness, which companies such as Google and Yahoo! are tapping into.
Now, if only the broadband and wireless companies who are rushing to build new walled gardens could get the same message....
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 1, 2005
Supernova 2004 video
Jonathan Marks, who attended Supernova 2004 from the Netherlands (and will be joining us again this year), put together a fantastic short video with highlights from last year's conference.
The video gives you a bit of the flavor of the event. And the fact that Jonathan put this together on his own gives you the flavor of the kind of people who attend. I like to say, "There is no audience at Supernova; only participants." This is a perfect example.
Check the video out here: (Quicktime | Windows Media)
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack