I’ve Moved!

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– Alex

Immigration

As I posted on my History Rhymes blog:

The topic of immigration is a touchy subject, but is nonetheless important. It has been an important part of American history since the founding of our country. It was important 150 years ago and it remains important still. For us in the west in modern times, it is a particularly sensitive issue it seems.

I don’t care to discuss too much the politics of immigration as it is quite a sensitive subject, but I will say that I fully agree with what President Teddy Roosevelt had to say about immigration in 1907:

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

Music Updates

My new album, The Living Room, was released on May 4, 2008! It will be available in stores soon, but until then, you can listen to the whole album on Last.fm.

You can also now find me on Facebook! If you have a Facebook account, visit the page below and click the “Become a Fan” button!

Linux Shootout

InformationWeek has done a really interesting comparison on the Linux desktop distros. The distros compared were openSUSE, Ubuntu 8.4, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva Linux One, Fedora, SimplyMEPIS, and CentOS 5.1. Overall Ubuntu won for its ease of use, the robust features it offers and for its ability to work on almost any hardware.

You can find the entire article here.

Switching from a Mac

In technolgy news today it seems that all you hear about are high profile executives and long-time Windows programmers switching to Mac. You never seem to hear the stories about those who go from habitually using a Mac to Windows. The stories are just nowhere to be found. I, however, intend to change that with this post.

As some of you may already know, I have used a Mac for several years now. My first Mac was a 700 MHz iBook with 128 MB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.1. My current Mac is a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 with 768 MB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.4 which is certainly not anything impressive. As such, I am in the market for a new laptop, however, this time I have opted to buy a PC running Windows (or Linux; see some of my earlier posts regarding Linux) instead of a Mac. Why though?

The first argument I would like to get out of the way is Windows itself. I do not need Windows or any particular application that will run on it and not the Mac. Everything I do and have been doing for work or personal reasons I have been able to do on the Mac without any problems. My primary reason for looking for a PC isn’t the software, but rather the hardware.

The fact of the matter is that Apple’s hardware selection is severely limited and quite expensive. While it does look great and runs fine, I just can’t find any more justification for buying a Mac on hardware dictated by Apple that is more expensive. When looking at laptops or even their all-in-ones, Apple severely limits what kind of video card I can have, the size of hard drive available, etc.

For now, I’m going to just talk about the laptops as that is what I am looking to purchase. As an example, Apple’s MacBook line of laptops only comes with a video card with 144 MB shared memory. The video card is important to me and while Apple does offer a couple of different customization options, the video card is not one of them. There is no other option unless you look at their MacBook Pro line which also comes with a serious price jump.

As a comparison, I have chosen to place Dell’s XPS laptop against Apple’s MacBook. Both are in the price range I am looking to spend on a new laptop ($1000-$1500) and both have similar offers. Below I have listed the specifications for the configuration of each laptop you can get for $1499. The specifications are taken from Apple’s and Dell’s websites.

Apple’s MacBook – $1499.00

• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• 2 GB memory
• 144 MB shared video memory
• 250 GB hard drive
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Apple’s iSight webcam
• 13.3″ screen (max resolution of 1280 x 800)

Dell’s XPS laptop – $1499

• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
• 4 GB memory
• 256 MB of dedicated video memory (NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT)
• 320 GB hard drive
• DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW drive
• 2 MP webcam
• 15.4″ screen (max resolution of 1440 x 900)
• Finger print reader

For the same price, the Dell laptop has a much better value. Some of the key differences are that the Dell has almost double the video memory (and it’s dedicated too!), it has a much larger screen with a much higher maximum resolution, it has double the regular system memory, it has a much larger hard drive and it comes standard with a finger print reader. It seems to me that there is a large difference between the two.

Now I know what any Mac enthusiast might argue as I probably would have made the same arguments not too long ago myself. You don’t need a finger print reader. You don’t need all of that memory when you’re running a superior operating system such as Mac OS X that doesn’t consume as much memory as Windows. You don’t need the extra video memory. You don’t need a larger screen on a laptop because it makes it less mobile. You don’t need a bigger hard drive when a superior operating system like Mac OS X doesn’t take up a large portion of it. The quality of the iSight is better than any webcam Dell could put in their computers. And then of course, I can’t forget my favorite one which always serves as a “catch-all” for people Mac enthusiasts: Mac OS X is worth the extra expense!

I read back over the arguments and can’t believe I would have made them at any point in my life. First of all, from my own experience, I can say that Mac OS X DOES take up an enormous amount of memory a lot of the time. As my computer has gotten older and applications start to use more and more memory, I have taken on the habit of meticulously managing my memory usage. There are several occasions where I load up the Activity Monitor in Mac OS X and a Mac OS X process (or more than one) is consuming most or practically all of my memory.

Now we come to the video memory. That one is just a dumb argument to begin with as games and any graphics-heavy application require a certain amount of memory no matter what kind of operating system or hardware you are running. Logically, the more video memory you have the better these applications will run.

A larger screen is of course a matter of personal preference. My last two laptops, an Apple iBook and an Apple PowerBook, both had 12″ screens. To be quite honest, I am sick of having a tiny screen and want something much larger. The argument that a larger screen hampers the mobility of the laptop is true, however, mobility is not nearly as important to me at this point as a bigger screen is. One might argue I should just get a desktop then, but the problem with that is that mobility is still important to me; just not as important as a large screen.

We all know that Windows Vista is a hard drive hog so to speak. At a whopping 15 GB, it is an enormous operating system. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) needs 9 GB of hard drive space. But even with a 15 GB operating system, that still doesn’t counter the gain in free hard drive space I would gain by going with the Dell instead of the MacBook.

Then of course we have the webcam and the finger print reader. The iSight might be better quality than that of Dell’s XPS webcam, I don’t know as I have no experience with webcams. And as I don’t intend to really use it, it doesn’t matter to me. Then we have the finger print reader which is just plain cool!

Now for my favorite argument: Mac OS X is worth the expense! No, it is not! While the operating system might not be plagued with viruses, malware and other forms of annoyances like Windows is, it is not worth the extra expense nor the nuisance of not being able to go down to the local computer shop or even Walmart to buy software.

While I still believe Apple does offer a quality product in both hardware and software forms, I don’t think that this “Apple tax” is something I care to continue paying for a computer of lesser ability. Mac OS X’s market share continues to grow, but I believe Apple’s practice of imposing their “Apple tax” on their hardware is either going to have to change or they will have to distribute a version of Mac OS X with an OEM license to other hardware makers such as Dell or HP. Otherwise their market share is going to hit a roof that they won’t be able to get around.

Hillary is Ruining It!

I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but it appears to me that Hillary Clinton is ruining any chance the Democratic party has against the Republicans. The Democrats really should have this election in the bag due to Bush’s sharp decline in popularity, however, with all of this internal fighting between Hillary and Obama, that may not happen — or at very least, it’s not going to be as easy as it really should be.

When it comes to the final election in November, I hope the Democrats win because I really dislike McCain and would be quite scared if he were to be elected, but I refuse to vote for Hillary.

ISPs Injecting Websites with Ads

This kind of infuriates me:

“Last July, a research team from the University of Washington released an online tool to analyze whether web pages were being altered during the transit from web server to user. On Wednesday, the team released a paper at the Usenix conference analyzing the data collected from the tool. The found, unsurprisingly, that ISPs were indeed injecting ads into web pages viewed by a small number of users. The paper is available at the Usenix site.” (Source: Slashdot)

ISPs should not have any right to alter webpage content whatsoever, much less inject ads into websites that normally don’t contain any ads. That’s especially if you’re paying for their service in the first place.

It seems to me that that should be considered spamming or even vandalizing. As a web developer, the kinds of websites I work on generally don’t have any sort of ads on theem. I don’t want my visitors to have to see ads if I haven’t originally intended the website to have ads.

You can read the full and longer article at PC World.

History Rhymes

I know everyone is going to call me crazy, but I’ve started yet another blog. This one is called “History Rhymes” and focuses on 19th century postbellum American history. I chose to start this blog because I am currently studying American history at my university as an undergraduate and will hopefully soon start at a graduate level. My studies are going to really focus on the post-Civil War settlement of the American west, the Indian Wars, etc.

Anyway, I will be using History Rhymes as a place to vent some of my findings and share them with everyone.

You can find the new blog here: http://historyrhymes.wordpress.com.

Going Online

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in my computer habits as of the past few months. Slowly but surely I seem to find myself more and more in the “cloud” – that is using more and more online applications as opposed to offline applications.

I think the first thing to go was the RSS reader. I used to use NetWireNews for Mac OS X, but I eventually gave that up for Google Reader. The next application I gave up was my e-mail application. I used to use Mail that comes with Mac OS X, but eventually I stopped using it all together when Gmail (also called Google Mail) added support to check POP3 accounts on top of its own mail service. Gmail had already long had the ability to send mail disguised as other e-mail addresses, but now I could also check other mail accounts.

I’m not sure I’m ready to give up Word or Pages just quite yet. Online replacements such as Google Docs are just not quite there yet; not to mention whether or not I trust Google or which host company with my private documents. We’ll see in time though.

Journler

A couple of days ago I got an notification that there was an update to the software I normally use for keeping track of all of my various blogs and my journals. The software is called Journler. I have to admit that I really like the software, but with the update came a new license saying that it was becoming shareware. It used to be something they called donationware which is where a user can choose to donate if they like the software.
I donated some money because I really liked the software, but according to the new license, I will have to buy the program if I want to continue using it despite having already donated the same amount the program will cost me ($40). I don’t know about you, but for me that was enough for me to uninstall the program and start using Word and a system of folders in my Documents folder as my new journal/blog organizing system.
As such, I have removed Journler from my Mac Software list. I’m quite disappointed because I really liked the program, but I will no longer be using it.