Archive for August, 2008
Five Bogus Claims Mac Fans Should Stop Making (and what they should say instead)
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Essays, Technology
Currently I’m using a Lenovo ThinkPad T61p. It’s a nice laptop, but comparing it to the much-more-modestly-powered iBook I used before this, I have to say I prefer the Mac OS X environment over Windows, even though Vista has made significant strides forward for Windows in terms of usability. My reasons are not the typical marketing lines you’ll hear from Apple drones, Mac freaks, or Justin Long. In fact, many of the things you’ll hear from the Get a Mac ads are outright lies, and Apple fans who repeat them are colossal dorks. They’ve chosen a brand loyalty based on a veneer of exclusivity, and mounds of disinformation about the competition. I’m sure that when you’re talking up your favorite product, you don’t want to come across as a tremendous douchebag. So here are a few things to avoid when talking to other people about your Mac.
1. “It’s so much more secure!”
It isn’t. In fact, there’s evidence that it’s less secure than a Windows machine. Security these days is largely a problem that exists in the howling chasm between the ears of most Internet users. Anyone with a wireless network in their home has some manner of firewall built into the hardware, and if they don’t, they probably went out of their way to do it wrong. UNIX is a tried and trusted platform, so bias in favor of OS X for security’s sake is probably fair, but when you’re running everything as Administrator you might as well leave your front door and car completely unlocked, bicycle without a helmet, and hop backwards on your left foot down a flight of stairs, because clearly you have no concept of basic safety measures.
And you know what else? The notorious security checks of Windows Vista are there for a reason. Asking the user permission to do every Admin-level task will draw attention to the malicious software that tries to do something that the user had no intention of letting it do. Vista gives you the chance to stop malware in its tracks. Windows has to support thousands of third-party applications, and the guard rails have to go somewhere.
What you should say instead:
“I prefer the OS X security model over that of Windows.”
2. “There’s no Blue Screen of Death!” / “It’s so much more stable!”
This is like saying Mac OS X won’t give you polio. This is a problem that was cured a long time ago, but the way the Mac ads tell it, you’d think running Windows was an OSHA violation. I can’t even remember the last time I saw even a Windows XP computer bluescreen, and we use dozens of such machines at work. I haven’t yet heard of a Vista computer encountering a system-halting failure.
I worked on a newspaper for a semester and everyone was using Macs. It was a very nice and very appropriate setup, and most of the time everything worked fine, but I’d be a liar if I ever claimed those Macs ran flawlessly 100% of the time. Use your Mac long enough, and you’ll get to see an application hang or crash. You’ll get to lose unsaved work, to see the trackpad stop registering, or see a window refuse to dock, or witness some other unexplainable failure. It’s a computer! It runs billions of calculations each second working off of gigabytes worth of data and code! You don’t think that once or twice something is going to go wrong? Macs are not magic. They will fail you.
What you should say instead:
Nothing.
3. “There are no viruses!”
Yes there are. Remember when Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, told students at Columbia University that Iran has no gay people? He was almost laughed out of the auditorium, and anyone who hears you make the above claim will react the same way if they know anything about computers. People who write viruses are usually trying to turn a computer into a spam-forwarding zombie, or harvest financial or identity information from a computer so they can go commit some fraud and identity theft. They try to cast a wide net, so usually they go the Windows route. So far, Mac users have enjoyed freedom from these threats just because they are such a small pool of users. In all cases, whether with Windows or Mac, the most important tool for avoiding viruses is your own brain. Every email is a suspect. Every website is a potential threat. Be aware and be cautious, because your operating system will NOT save you all by itself.
Sadly, this is a front where Windows suffers severely. Not from viruses, but from anti-virus software. Norton and McAffee antivirus programs infiltrate your computer just like the cooties they are meant to thwart, gum up the registry, slow things down, and can be impossible to uninstall.
What you should say instead:
“It’s less of a target for viruses than Windows, so I feel safer using it.”
4. “It just works!”
So does Windows, you ninny. That’s why nobody uses Linux. What’s worse is that the last time Microsoft bundled important software with their operating system, they had to waste millions fending off a lawsuit from the sore losers in the market. Yet almost every software program on your Mac was made by Apple! Is it any wonder they work so harmoniously?
What you should say instead:
“It suits my needs and I like it.”
5. “PCs suck!”
The cheapest Apple laptop is $1100. The cheapest Dell notebook is $500, and others make them even cheaper. There’s a $600 premium for that MacBook, because you’re paying for specialized hardware and top-notch design. Not everyone places so much value on those factors, and they don’t appreciate being talked down to. If you want to convince someone that the computer you use is such a great product, you will not win them over by telling them they are using something inferior. Finance software on the Mac is still garbage if it’s ported at all, and there is a host of applications specific to a certain occupation or type of hardware that is still years away from running on the Mac operating system. For many people the Mac is a non-option if they’re actually going to get their jobs done.
What we’re left with is the fact that both have their pluses and minuses, and the “better” OS is going to depend on the user.
What you should say instead:
“Macs rock!”
There’s plenty of good things about Apple’s computing platform. The elegant operating system, the slick design, and quality first-party applications are just the beginning. There’s no need to bash the conventional products as inferior. Hopefully, if you’re a Mac enthusiast, this article has helped make you less annoying to your PC-using friends.
The Case For Brick and Mortar
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Literature
I am currently attending the Book Seminar at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. So far it has been nothing but the most enlightening experience for a book seller like myself. I can talk about the education I’ve been getting later, but right now something presses rather hard on my mind. Tonight we (I and several other seminar attendees) went to visit the brick and mortar bookstore called Hooked on Books, in Colorado Springs. I came out with what I hope is an insight into the future of the book trade.
The book market continues to morph, with customers diverting from mom-and-pop shops to Barnes & Noble and Borders, and ordering their used books over the Internet. It can look like the “small” brick-and-mortar bookstore is doomed. I choose to disagree.
This post isn’t what you think it’s going to be. I’m not going to wax poetic about the atmosphere, the community, the unquantifiable experience of buying a book at a locally-owned shop. The reason such book stores have a shot at surviving the coming decades, and even have an opportunity to prosper, does have something to do with those romantic aspects, but those things alone don’t make people look for a book at your store instead of going to a bigger, national coffee chain with a Doubleday distributorship attached, like Barnes and Noble.
People go where they can find what they want at a good price. I crave science fiction classics. Since only the smaller shops deign to carry used books, it is only in that venue that I can possibly find a meaningful selection. The big box retailers’ shelves are so full of new titles they only have the shelf space for a few of the most obvious classics. What I’m really describing is the problem with brick-and-mortar that the Internet supposedly solved, when Amazon showed you could market to the “long tail” and be successful online.
1. Localization Means Something: There are several little long tails in every town, and local book shops may be in a good position to capitalize on those small, sundry markets. The big retailers are victims of their own size, forced to strongly emphasize a huge selection of the most popular books and multimedia just to support their own massive weight. I can find a battered old copy of Wyrms by Orson Scott Card at a used book store. I have yet to discover this title on the shelves of Borders.
In any given community, there are countless library sales, garage sales, Salvation Army and Goodwill sales, just to name a few varieties, where bookstore proprietors can glean inventory for practically nothing. These used books are byproducts of what the community reads. They contain samples from several subsets of readers in the area. Out of Hooked on Books’ inventory of 250,000 books, I found a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
I can never find that book at Barnes and Noble.
The owners of local bookstores are members of the local historical societies, various book organizations and clubs. In other words, they are positioned to know their market with a much finer resolution than the big box retailers run by corporate committees hundreds of miles away. Good bookstores’ finely tuned knowledge of the local literary environment, and their willingness to carry new and used books, actually gives them very good odds of having the book you want.
2. Used Prices Undercut New Prices: In a sagging economy, the fact that you can find an entertaining used paperback for half the price of a freshly-minted one is going to become an increasingly important factor in the buying decisions of readers. This is an entire class of book that the big boxes refuse to deal in. At the price point of a used paperback, introducing shipping makes an online purchase so prohibitive one may as well buy a new copy. As long as there is a market for used books, I feel it is rational to assume that brick-and-mortar book stores will be viable.
3. Digital May Introduce a “Print Premium”: The invention of the Amazon Kindle has introduced stupendous convenience into the book-buying experience. I may even buy one myself. However, the staggering number of works that remain out of digital format, which may never be converted to digital format, makes complete bunk out of the notion that our entire bookshelf will be reduced to so many electrons swirling inside an electronic reader.
Moreover, there are too many points of failure in such electronic contrivances. Suppose Amazon forgets what you’ve bought and your Kindle’s hard drive corrupts? Suppose the device breaks? Suppose you are unable to charge it for a long period of time? What happens when the 3G network has an outage? When all the infrastructure is humming along nicely, a Kindle is a superb way to condense your reading, save space and enhance the reading experience. I’m certain it makes a great traveling companion. But do you really want your entire library one day to be at the mercy of a single wafer of silicon?
Even if digital delivery of print media takes off and becomes one of the dominant vehicles of literature, it might help these brick and mortar book stores in an unexpected way: by turning physical books into objectes even more special than they currently are. The latest John Grisham novel will no doubt be available for $9.99 on the Kindle, to be bought and delivered instantly into the hands of anyone with that device and a desire to read it. But a great work by a more obscure author may never make it into digitized form, and its non-common status will make it equally impossible to obtain at B&N or Borders. The one place to get it will still be the used bookstore.
4. Digital does not make Analog obsolete: As there remains a market for vinyl records, so shall there remain a market for physical books. And I’m not suggesting that the dead-tree variety of books is going to go the way of vinyl in any way. It’s just an example that the introduction of a new form of media does not necessarily make the predecessor obsolete. The book is a form which has endured for thousands of years. It is unlikely that Jeff Bezos will drive it into obsolescence in less time than that.
Markets May Change, But Some Will Never Die. The arrival of the big box retailers has largely, but not completely, replaced the niches served in local markets by the smaller, locally owned stores. I doubt they ever wil. The advent of the usable e-book medium has not even begun to usurp the physical book, but it may very well change our relationship with physical books, and possibly for the better. It may seem like locally-owned brick-and-mortar bookstores are besieged by corporate giants and the inexorable march of technology, but the truth is that they serve a function in the market that they already do the best in serving. The number of such stores that the market can support may change, but the fundamental need for them may never go away.